Retiring The Machine: Time for a New Computer Soon (The Novella)

[whispersinspace]

Do not envy you that project....

[GaryG]

Good to hear things are progressing.

[aoVI]

I took Adaptiverb out for a spin last night supporting 2 layered synths (arturia's Farfisa and Solina--with the convo verb on ) and Ubermod. I can actually use it live and full flavored (allpass) around 512. The latency was around 14ms, but for big smeary resonant verb sound like I tend to be attracted to, that's not much of an issue. The sample rate has to double to 1024 for ray-tracing, and the HD even a bit more than that, making the lat very apparent (around 40ms), but still not completely unusable live, if you are going slo-mo ambient.

[aoVI]

I've got about 99% of everything I use in recording regularly installed. The big catch is the 32 bit stuff I bridged, and I can't seem to figure out a way to get my Camel Audio stuff, but kind of figured that was going to happen. I installed things all over the place on my old machine so it was a bit of a mess finding presets. This time I just have a single folder, with each developer's folder in there. This process has really made me rethink the amount of VST's I have collected over the years. I didn't pare down, and if anything, added more (new freebies!).

Most things installed and authorized without a hitch, and when I needed to contact support, I got immediate and helpful responses. A couple of devs even threw an old installer into Dropbox so I could have old versions sitting next to new versions, where that made a difference. Among the great support I received was from Psychic Modulation, Xils Lab, Applied Acoustic Systems, and the team at Don't Crack (reseller) who helped me get a hold of some old installers that don't exist any longer. Impressive support.

I ran a mix last night and finally really felt the power this new machine provides. It's a 53 minute long composition, with some CPU eating plugs. My old machine could manage mixing down at about 2.2x realtime, and I was having issues with a crackle or two if I mixed in realtime. Last night's rendering ran at 8.9x realtime, and made me a cup of coffee while it worked. Ok, no coffee, but it was nice to see the improvement.

All I really need to do is install Adobe CS and I am back.

[aoVI]

I spent the rainy day (thanks to Subtropical storm Alberto) doing studio maintenance tasks; backing up, cleaning out the project drive of finished/deadend projects, sweeping out the downloads folder, uninstalling demos, updating, etc.

While doing a reboot I just decided to try my hand at a small overclock. Everything went great, system is stable, no terrible temp problems-well, for a 8700k they aren't too bad. Got it to a hair over 5 GHz, which isn't setting any records nor much above the factory turbo frequency of 4.7 (3.7 normal). It may be a bit of a placebo effect, but it feels noticeable to me. I ran two instances of Adaptiverb in ray-trace HD (and a number of other plugs) without pops or crackles, S1 perf meter around 30%. No lack of latency though.

If any of you computer-wise folks care to opine on anything you see that looks like it could be problematic, I'd be most appreciative. I like a bit more juice, but not at a cost of frying a chip in just a couple of years.


CPU-Z:




Temps while running a fairly heavy project (this was about an hour's worth of running--I monitored though a full evening of recording, mixing, and rendering and the max values did end up around 20 degrees higher, but average only bumped up about 5 or more:



Studio One perf meter on a session:

s1perf.JPG

[aoVI]

Updated more accurate temp info on a 6 hour multi-project session (rec/mix/render). I accidentally clipped off the header but the temp columns are current/minimum/maximum/average:

tempssession.JPG