Design a PC/Server for ROON and HQ Player

[Miska]

4 hours ago, semeniub said:

My card is the ASUS Turbo GeForce RTX 2080 8GB model, non "Ti" version.

 

Ahh, same card I ordered! I hope the fan is not insanely loud. The ASUS Dual-version with two large traditional fans is probably quieter, but I didn't want it because it is so thick, takes 2.7 slots! Turbo model fits into two slots.

[semeniub]

4 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

Ahh, same card I ordered! I hope the fan is not insanely loud. The ASUS Dual-version with two large traditional fans is probably quieter, but I didn't want it because it is so thick, takes 2.7 slots! Turbo model fits into two slots.

It hasn't been too loud for me so far... but my listening setup is in my office where there is some background noise from a few workstations running 24/7 on full load...

[Miska]

13 minutes ago, semeniub said:

It hasn't been too loud for me so far... but my listening setup is in my office where there is some background noise from a few workstations running 24/7 on full load...

 

Similar case like mine, I plan to put it into my HP Xeon workstation. But it is otherwise very quiet even at full load, in fact HP has done very good job on cooling because it doesn't become any louder under full load than when it's idling. Practically all sound is from the spinning data disk (8 TB), OS disk is 2 TB SSD. I have my headphone rig on the office desk, which is how I do most of my listening...

 

[semeniub]

14 minutes ago, Miska said:

 

Similar case like mine, I plan to put it into my HP Xeon workstation. But it is otherwise very quiet even at full load, in fact HP has done very good job on cooling because it doesn't become any louder under full load than when it's idling. Practically all sound is from the spinning data disk (8 TB), OS disk is 2 TB SSD. I have my headphone rig on the office desk, which is how I do most of my listening...

 

I only slightly hear the pumps for the cpu cooling radiators in my HP workstations, and this is only when all cores are under full load. The cpu's never reach critical temps, so cooling airflow is definitely good.  

[Miska]

I have now tested the new RTX 2080 and it seems to be quite a bit better than old GTX 1080.

 

However, they have still crippled it in the same traditional way, probably to make it cheaper. If anybody has Titan V or Quadro GV100, I would like to hear how those perform... Of course price is quite different too.

 

[craighartley]

On 10/8/2018 at 6:30 PM, Miska said:

I have now tested the new RTX 2080 and it seems to be quite a bit better than old GTX 1080.

 

However, they have still crippled it in the same traditional way, probably to make it cheaper. If anybody has Titan V or Quadro GV100, I would like to hear how those perform... Of course price is quite different too.

 

 

Is the 2080 Ti likely to be a worthwhile improvement over the 2080?

 

[Miska]

15 minutes ago, craighartley said:

 

Is the 2080 Ti likely to be a worthwhile improvement over the 2080?

 

 

Some more processing power... Raw numbers show that 2080 has about 2/3rds of the processing power of 2080 Ti. Price difference is pretty much exactly the same (1000€ vs 1500€).

 

[bibo01]

@Miska

A little while ago you gave a recommendation for CUDA card choice in comparison to CPU speed, but I cannot find that post.

Could you please tell me again how to choose a card that would not slow down cpu?

[Miska]

6 hours ago, bibo01 said:

@Miska

A little while ago you gave a recommendation for CUDA card choice in comparison to CPU speed, but I cannot find that post.

Could you please tell me again how to choose a card that would not slow down cpu?

 

It was just quite simplistic rule-of-thumb. So don't buy a GPU that is cheaper than the CPU. Or maybe more like cheaper than CPU+MoBo+RAM. But the choice ultimately depends on what you want to do.

 

[Outlaw]

When buying a video card for CUDA offload in HQPlayer is the amount of CUDA cores or the speed of the GPU more important ?

[Solstice380]

On 10/10/2018 at 4:23 AM, Miska said:

 

Some more processing power... Raw numbers show that 2080 has about 2/3rds of the processing power of 2080 Ti. Price difference is pretty much exactly the same (1000€ vs 1500€).

 

 

The benchmarks I’ve seen show only a slight improvement for the Ti.  At US$400 more it doesn’t seem like a big increase in performance.  

 

Another question:  if I have room in my case is it better to go for a dual fan model (or triple fan Gaming)?

[Miska]

5 hours ago, Solstice380 said:

Another question:  if I have room in my case is it better to go for a dual fan model (or triple fan Gaming)?

 

Yes, the dual fan model is likely more quiet and the STRIX triple fan is likely even more so. At least in the single fan "Turbo" model, fan gets noisy at higher speeds (loads). The triple fan 1080 STRIX I have in my big server is totally quiet under all loads I've thrown at it.

 

[Solstice380]

1 hour ago, Miska said:

 

Yes, the dual fan model is likely more quiet and the STRIX triple fan is likely even more so. At least in the single fan "Turbo" model, fan gets noisy at higher speeds (loads). The triple fan 1080 STRIX I have in my big server is totally quiet under all loads I've thrown at it.

 

 

Thanks, that was my common sense thought as well.   Glad to hear about the 1080 noise level.

 

I recently had a pump go out on my Corsair water CPU cooler.  The fan on the new version is quieter and the temp dropped a couple degrees, too.  

[twluke]

On 10/3/2018 at 5:43 PM, semeniub said:

-snip-

I just wanted to let everyone know that a recent graphics card upgrade to a RTX 2080 has now allowed me (with my modest i7-6700k CPU) to use the full poly-sinc-xtr filter and upsample to DSD512 smoothly. This includes 44/16 files.

 

@semeniub: Thank you for this very helpful comment. I really appreciated it. Recently I installed an RTX 2080 card  (EVGA RTX 2080 XC Gaming, 8GB) on my i7 8700K fanless PC and confirmed that it did work quite well for playing upsampled DSD512 from 44.1/16 sources with the poly-sinc-xtr filter on my linux system (Ubuntu 18.04).

 

The HQP version is 3.25.1-81 and the screen shot below includes the result of nvidia-smi and thermal records of CPU and GPU during DSD512 play with xtr filter. The CPU temperature is I think within reasonable ranges. BTW the fanless case shown below is an H5 from HDPLEX with a fanless SFX PSU (SST-NJ450-SXL, SilverStone ) inside. Very quiet system. No subtle hint of fan noise from GPU.

 

Regards,

[Solstice380]

I can also confirm the RTX2080 STRIX OC Gaming with a 6700K (I need to fix my sig says 7700K) can do non -2s xtr 44/16 to 44x512 with CPU @ 27-33% and GPU at 70%.  Core temps will spike during filter build for a couple seconds and music starts within 4-5 seconds.  I’m impressed!  It will also do 48/24 to 44x512 with an additional 5% added to the CPU and GPU utilization.  Filter build takes about 2X it seems.  

 

I’ll play around with some other filters.  I think I remember closed form or another being more difficult to crunch.

[Johnseye]

Are you guys doing anything special other than checking the CUDA box in HQPlayer?

[semeniub]

7 hours ago, twluke said:

 

@semeniub: Thank you for this very helpful comment. I really appreciated it. Recently I installed an RTX 2080 card  (EVGA RTX 2080 XC Gaming, 8GB) on my i7 8700K fanless PC and confirmed that it did work quite well for playing upsampled DSD512 from 44.1/16 sources with the poly-sinc-xtr filter on my linux system (Ubuntu 18.04).

 

The HQP version is 3.25.1-81 and the screen shot below includes the result of nvidia-smi and thermal records of CPU and GPU during DSD512 play with xtr filter. The CPU temperature is I think within reasonable ranges. BTW the fanless case shown below is an H5 from HDPLEX with a fanless SFX PSU (SST-NJ450-SXL, SilverStone ) inside. Very quiet system. No subtle hint of fan noise from GPU.

 

Regards,

 

Very good news! I'm glad that my own experiences were able to help.

 

Cheers

[twluke]

5 hours ago, Johnseye said:

Are you guys doing anything special other than checking the CUDA box in HQPlayer?

Nothing special with my setting as shown in the picture below.

 

Regards,

 

[redrockt990]

On 10/8/2018 at 12:30 PM, Miska said:

I have now tested the new RTX 2080 and it seems to be quite a bit better than old GTX 1080.

 

However, they have still crippled it in the same traditional way, probably to make it cheaper. If anybody has Titan V or Quadro GV100, I would like to hear how those perform... Of course price is quite different too.

 

 

Apologies in advance if this has been answered previously, but why would you expect the Titan or Quadro to outperform the new RTX cards?

Also, has anyone successfully used CUDA offloading to an NVIDIA card in an eGFX enclosure connected via Thunderbolt 2 or Thunderbolt 3?

[Miska]

5 hours ago, redrockt990 said:

Apologies in advance if this has been answered previously, but why would you expect the Titan or Quadro to outperform the new RTX cards?

 

Titan V and Quadro V100 are supposed to be quite a bit faster...

 

[Outlaw]

How much better are the 2000 series GPU then the 1000 series for HQPlayer for cuda offload.Would a 2070 be better then a 1080 ?

[CJH]

Looking to upgrade my current PC using Roon/HQP/Win10pro (i7 gen 3--doing DSD 256 upsampling OK) so I can enjoy upsampled DSD512 (22/24MHz) to a Rendu. Found this relatively inexpensive option. Please let me know if it has enough processing power--thanks.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FZMT7GS/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=A3JS2199GQLB8L&psc=1  

[Montanari]

It depend by The filter you are going to use 

With the non xtr Will work but maybe Your i7 3rd generation is already enough 

[PieterP]

X1 Digital Music Streamer (DIY)

I wanted to share with you my recently finished X1 Digital Music Streamer with HQPe player in a custom DIY chassis. Currently, I use it to stream DSD 256 to my RME Adi-2 dac (which is a great dac!).

 

Design philosophy

1)      Big Sister: my streamer is based on a Modushop slimline chassis because I wanted this beauty to fit her muscular big brother, an AMB Beta 24 power amplifier (see last photo). This way, I can connect my streamer directly to my dac and now I don’t need a network connection and a NAA.

2)      Heat pipes: I didn’t want to make a passively cooled system with heat pipes and a large heat sink (like Pink Faun or SGM) as I regard this heat pipe system less flexible for future changes in CPU/Mobo/GPU combinations.

3)      65W TDP CPU: my streamer currently uses a 65W CPU Ryzen 5 1600 (6 core, max 3.6 Ghz). In a few months, I may upgrade to Ryzen 5 3600 (8 core, max 4.4Ghz, at 65W).

4)      Fan of Fans: I am like many of you not a fan of fans, but if they are not audible, why not? I use a Be quiet Dark Rock TF CPU cooler which fits into my chassis and is one of the most quiet and best topflow coolers (PWN). In addition, I use four 92 mm Noctua chassis fans operated by a manual fan controller to keep noise in control.

5)      NoNo: at 4 meters distance No Noise, you really can’t hear the streamer (when upsampling red book to dsd256). If you lay your ear at 20 cm from the streamer, you will hear the fans whisper very quietly. But at 20 cm distance, one will also hear the toroidal transformer of your power amplifier.

6)      USB 3.1 gen2: at first, I had two AMB Sigma Linear PSU’s (at 5V) to separately power a Paul Pang v2 USB card and the SSD. However, the Paul Pang v2 USB card couldn’t process DSD 256. I get best results with the USB 3.1 gen2 ports on my  Asus X470 mobo. Also, with the RME Adi-2 dac, the Paul Pang card doesn’t bring any advantage at lower upsampling rates.  

 

Tech specs chassis:

·       Modushop Slimline chassis 3U (1NSLA03350B), with full vented bottom and top plate;

·       ATX I/O 7 slot PCIe rear panel by laserhive / David Chugg UK;

·       Bitumen anti thump plates to reduce vibration noise by the chassis;

·       Front panel express engraving by Schaeffer AG Berlin;

 

Tech specs computer:

·       Asus Rog Strix X470-F Gaming;

·       Ryzen 5 1600;

·       Corsair 16GB 3000mhz (CMK16GX4M2B3000C15);

·       Samsung EVO 860 256GB;

·       Seasonic Prime Titanium 600W (fanless) + rubber vibration absorber;

·       Asus GForce GT710-SL (simple passive cooled videocard);

·       Be Quiet Dark Rock TF (CPU Cooler);

·       Lamptron CP436 fan controller (4x) + Noctua NF-A9 FLX (4x) + rubber vibration absorbers (4x).

 

[tboooe]

Please forgive my noob question regarding GPU, I've never used one before.  Does anyone us e one with Windows Server 2016 OS?  I'm considering the Asus ROG Strix RTX2080 08G OC and I see drivers for Windows 10 but not Server 2016.