Best CPU for hqplayer

[teera_ash]

Ok, I got it at last.  Ryzen 3700x OC to 42 can do polosinc-xtr-mp, asdm7ec, dsd256 with HQPlayer desktop on Gigabyte Aorus I pro wifi with multicore option selected and grey cuda option as I have a lowly gtx 1030 installed.  But audiolinux hqp embedded had slight pause every now and then.  Probably I have to modify AL's configuration?  Any suggestions?

[StreamFidelity]

7 hours ago, teera_ash said:

with multicore option selected

 

The core assignment runs better in my experience, if the multicore option is gray.

[Miska]

8 hours ago, teera_ash said:

Ok, I got it at last.  Ryzen 3700x OC to 42 can do polosinc-xtr-mp, asdm7ec, dsd256 with HQPlayer desktop on Gigabyte Aorus I pro wifi with multicore option selected and grey cuda option as I have a lowly gtx 1030 installed.  But audiolinux hqp embedded had slight pause every now and then.  Probably I have to modify AL's configuration?  Any suggestions?

 

Have you tried the my HQPlayer Embedded image? It is easy as setting some baseline as it doesn't require installation and doesn't have settings apart from normal HQPlayer settings.

 

[teera_ash]

Thanks for all suggestions.  HQP Embedded sound interesting.  I'm not sure how to use Roon as a control application for this embedded?

[Miska]

On 11/30/2019 at 3:31 PM, teera_ash said:

Thanks for all suggestions.  HQP Embedded sound interesting.  I'm not sure how to use Roon as a control application for this embedded?

 

From Roon's perspective both Desktop and Embedded look and work exactly the same.

 

[teera_ash]

Finally I can do polosinc-xtr-mp, asdm7ec, dsd256 with Ryzen 3700X on Audiolinux.  I OC CPU to 4350 MHz and memory to 3200 mhz.  Hyperthread enable, adding "multicore="1" " to home/.HQPlayer/HQPlayer.xml, disable real time expert configuration and ramroot. Average temperature is around 72-78°C.

 

Ryzen 3950X should be overkill for HQPlayer highest setting.

Should add that it sounds great!

[luisma]

Need to pick a board x570 for a 3800x and run HQP on it, the Gigabyte x570 doesn't seem to have the DAC-UP port, any recommendations on which board I could use for audio?

[Yviena]

In my opinion HQplayer version 4.1.0.1 still has the best CPU usage, and behavior when manually selecting cores for EC7 modulator with my 3700x, idk why but newer builds still do not behave the same way as 4.1.0.1 with corepinning disabled even if miska said it should disable the changes done to core allocations...

 

Like for example i can disable core pinning in the newest build select 4 cores for HQplayer to be on via affinity cpu usage around 21% i get drop outs but if i leave corepinning on, but use process lasso to set the affinity to those same cpu cores on program start , cpu usage is the same but then i get no dropouts...

[Miska]

6 hours ago, Yviena said:

Like for example i can disable core pinning in the newest build select 4 cores for HQplayer to be on via affinity cpu usage around 21% i get drop outs but if i leave corepinning on, but use process lasso to set the affinity to those same cpu cores on program start , cpu usage is the same but then i get no dropouts...

 

No surprise, because without corepinning you don't know how each thread end up being distributed to CPU cores. You may very well get unfavorable distribution. OS scheduler has no idea how different threads are related to each other.

 

21% is whole machine, not load of an individual core. If any individual core with the high load threads hits 100+% you get dropout.

 

So far only macOS scheduler seems to understand how to deal with application like HQPlayer properly. Windows 10 scheduler is supposed to (unless you mess with the core OS apart from setting High Performance or Ultimate Performance power profile).

 

[madman73]

Hi all, hi @Miska.

i need to upgrade my cpu, now i have an i3-2100t running on a Gigabyte GA-Z68MX-UD2H-B3-rev-13 with 8GB of Ram.

I don't need the output DSD (but i want to play it), my DAC is PCM only (BB1704k based), max 768Khz.

Trying HQPlayer 4 Embedded with Roon, i can get XTR-MP filters upsampling from 44.1 to 768Khz/NS5, with a 40/50 sec of initialization time but i want to add convolution for 2ch only.

I can find i5-3570k for 50/60€ and i7-3770k for 110/120€, my goal is to reduce the initialization time at minimun possible.

Is the 3570k able to do it or i need the 3770k?

If i want to use the CUDA offload, which kind of card do i need, in my setup?  

Thanks.

[Miska]

8 hours ago, madman73 said:

i need to upgrade my cpu, now i have an i3-2100t running on a Gigabyte GA-Z68MX-UD2H-B3-rev-13 with 8GB of Ram.

I don't need the output DSD (but i want to play it), my DAC is PCM only (BB1704k based), max 768Khz.

Trying HQPlayer 4 Embedded with Roon, i can get XTR-MP filters upsampling from 44.1 to 768Khz/NS5, with a 40/50 sec of initialization time but i want to add convolution for 2ch only.

I can find i5-3570k for 50/60€ and i7-3770k for 110/120€, my goal is to reduce the initialization time at minimun possible.

Is the 3570k able to do it or i need the 3770k?

 

It is really hard to say without testing, so I would go straight for i7-3770K.

 

8 hours ago, madman73 said:

If i want to use the CUDA offload, which kind of card do i need, in my setup?

 

CUDA won't help on initialization time, but it can help quite a lot on convolution engine. In this case, likely something like GeForce GTX1650 Super or GTX1660 Super is affordable and powerful. I wouldn't go anything lower than that. But for these too, it is hard to say how they perform in this case without testing.

 

[Miska]

Here are some load figures from latest version (4.13, to be released some time soon, but applies also to 4.12). This on i7-8086K running Ubuntu Server and my custom version 5.4 kernel.

 

48k to 12.3 MHz DSD256 using single stage poly-sinc-xtr-lp and ASDM7EC modulator:

 

48k to 12.3 MHz DSD256 using sinc-M filter and ASDM7EC modulator:

 

48k to 1.536 MHz PCM using sinc-M filter:

 

[bodiebill]

On 12/2/2019 at 1:27 PM, teera_ash said:

Hyperthread enable, adding "multicore="1" " to home/.HQPlayer/HQPlayer.xml

 

Tried that, however the format of the lines in my HQPlayer.xml file are like

<fixed volume="3"/>

so I added

<multicore="1"/>

but ten HQPlayer no longer starts.

Any idea what I am doing wrong?

[Miska]

28 minutes ago, bodiebill said:

Tried that, however the format of the lines in my HQPlayer.xml file are like

<fixed volume="3"/>

so I added

<multicore="1"/>

but ten HQPlayer no longer starts.

Any idea what I am doing wrong?

 

Be careful when editing the plain configuration file so that the syntax doesn't become broken. What you describe doesn't work and violates the syntax (setting value to element name). Multicore setting is already there, by default set to value "auto", you can just adjust the value, the attribute belongs to "engine" element.

[bodiebill]

33 minutes ago, bodiebill said:

Tried that, however the format of the lines in my HQPlayer.xml file are like

<fixed volume="3"/>

so I added

<multicore="1"/>

but ten HQPlayer no longer starts.

Any idea what I am doing wrong?

 

Solved: I added multicore="1" in the string starting with engine auto_family... 🙂

[bodiebill]

thanks Miska, our posts crossed each other...

[bodiebill]

7 minutes ago, bodiebill said:

Solved: I added multicore="1" in the string starting with engine auto_family... 🙂

 

Removed however as it resulted in many dropouts.

 

[Miska]

10 minutes ago, bodiebill said:

Removed however as it resulted in many dropouts.

 

Yes, the default value "auto" should give best result in most cases. But the option is there for cases where the CPU has many cores, and the default "auto" setting doesn't work properly (gives dropouts), one can then try if the "all-in" approach works better.

 

There is always performance cost also related to communication between different cores, with "all-in" approach it tends to overweight the benefits. But sometimes it doesn't...

 

[bodiebill]

In my HQPlayer.xml file (I run it under AudioLinux) the multicore parameter was altogether missing. So there was no multicore="auto". Do you suggest I add multicore="all-in" ?

[Miska]

2 hours ago, bodiebill said:

In my HQPlayer.xml file (I run it under AudioLinux) the multicore parameter was altogether missing. So there was no multicore="auto". Do you suggest I add multicore="all-in" ?

 

No, there are values "0", "auto" and "1". I meant that "1" means that kind of all-in, enabling all the parallelizations on all cores.

 

If the parameter is not there, it defaults to "auto".

[bodiebill]

15 hours ago, Miska said:

No, there are values "0", "auto" and "1". I meant that "1" means that kind of all-in, enabling all the parallelizations on all cores.

If the parameter is not there, it defaults to "auto".

 

ah, clear, thx!

[Quadman]

Is anybody running a ryzen 2700X and overclocking it to the max turbo of 4.3Ghz?  I run my 1800x at its max of 4.0Ghz and can do 256 w EC5 modulators, so wondering if a 4.3Ghz OC would get EC 7 modulators?

[teera_ash]

I doubt that 2700X can do EC7, DSD256, with XTRs.  With 3700X, I have to max out,  cpu 43ghz, dram 3600 mhz.  Temp were around 65°c-68°c.  All 14 threads were working actively (10%+ load).  Only 2 threads were working below 2% load (they were reserved for something else I guess).  

My 3700x can do 43.5ghz but with vcore 1.4 v and temp will shoot to 79°c-80°c when fully loaded even with liquid 280mm radiator aio liquid cooling.  But I heard that some people can only hit 41.5 -42.0 GHz OC.  It's a silicon lottery and my 3700X is a keeper.  For your info, the 3900X have recently dethroned intel's world record on overclocking as it has better ipc and more threads.

[Quadman]

4 minutes ago, teera_ash said:

I doubt that 2700X can do EC7, DSD256, with XTRs. 

I don't care about XTR non 2s with EC 7.  EXT2 would be fine.  2700X can OC to 4.3 same as your 3700x so it might be possible.  My reason is 2700x is cheap right now like <$160. so it may be a nice temporary move until late next year/early 21 before I jump to the next upcoming gen CPU's.  Then XTR at 512  (no EC) be doable and 256 w EC7 work as well.  I prefer AMD as L3 Cache is much larger than intel and I think affects SQ in a positive way.  I am not sold on 3900x yet, price mostly or the intel 9900 series.

 

[teera_ash]

I got Ryzen 3950x and have been playing/testing it over the weekend with suggestions on settings from Audiolinux Piero.

Testing it with both HQP desktop and embedded using all available options of multicore, cuda --- enable, disable, auto or convolution.  Hyperthread enable, acpi, performance, turbo enable etc. I also experimented with various bios settings, precision boost, auto overclock, manually OC CPU to 42.5 GHz, dram 3600 MHz.  All settings were fairly stable with temp in comfortable range -no throttling with latest AMD qcode and mb's bios.

 

Simply put, dsd256 was fine with the most demanding filters and modulators but it was not no where near playing dsd512.  Lot of drop out every 1-2 seconds in all options I put in.  Inspecting real time CPU cores utilization showed that half of threads were actively utilized and the rest were almost idle.  Overall CPU utilization was around 15%.  Multicore and cuda offload enabled seem to be more efficient in CPU cores utilization.  The results suggested that hqp can better utilizes 8-10 cores CPU than higher core-count CPU.  In fact my 3700x (8cores) can play 256dsd almost as well as 3950x (16cores).  Nevertheless, 3950x at the same hqp configuration as 3700x sound more refined and pleasant with better details.  

 

Are there any consumer CPUs that can upstream most demanding hqp configurations? Threadripper, Xeon?   Is there anything else that I should try on bios settings, AL setups and HQP configurations?