Best CPU for hqplayer

[k6davis]

7 hours ago, Fleecyears said:

Hi All,

 

I'm in a position to build yet another server, which is capable of handling HQPlayer / Roon with ease and then pushed over to a Roon end point computer and then fed into the Denafrips Terminator DAC

 

Would like to upsample everything to DSD512, as the DAC supports this size.

 

The case will be completely passive (no fans) and likely be either the Turemetal UP10 or the MonsterLabo - The Beast.

 

Therefore, looking for recommendations on the right CPU and Graphics card to ensure it's capable of handling whatever HQPlayer throws at it.

 

I keep hearing many things from the Intel i9 1900 to the AMD Ryzen Threadripper series and as for the graphics card, I'm actually a little lost.

 

Appreciate any advice.

 

Cheers

 

This is speculative, but Apple is rumored to deliver the next generation of their M1 chip this quarter. There's no way to know what its HQP performance will be, but since I'm happy with my i7 9700K for now, I'm waiting to find out before I make any HQP server upgrade decisions.

[ted_b]

What is the HQP performance of the current Mac Mini M1 (i.e without any NAA)?  Most have quoted it WITH an NAA (of course).  Thx

[be Yourself]

I would use macOS. Definitely. M1 chip is super fast, it implements the concept of unified memory, so its 8 or 16 GB of RAM should suffice. The only issue is that BigSur is so much exposed to adware, I hope the release of Monteray will change that.

[ted_b]

Thx. I meant upsampling. What is M1 limit (rate and modulator)?

[ef-fi]

Hi @Miska Since next gen Apple Silicon is around the corner (M1X / M2) and native linux support has also started. Would it be possible HQP embedded for any Mx machine ?

[Miska]

14 hours ago, ted_b said:

Thx. I meant upsampling. What is M1 limit (rate and modulator)?

 

DSD256 with ASDM7EC.

 

[Miska]

7 hours ago, ef-fi said:

Hi @Miska Since next gen Apple Silicon is around the corner (M1X / M2) and native linux support has also started. Would it be possible HQP embedded for any Mx machine ?

 

Yes, certainly once there is official support for Apple machines in Ubuntu, Fedora or Debian.

 

[DomiJi]

Hello HQPlayer Lovers 😁

 

i am so satisfied with Euphony and HQPlayer that i want to upgrade my old NUC8i5 to a new Cirrus7 with one of the following CPUs:

• Intel i9 10900
• Intel i9 11900
• AMD Ryzen 4750g

Because the price differences are very small i want to pic the best CPU for HQPlayer. Does HQPlayer profit from the more cores of the i9 10900 vs the lesser cores of the i9 11900?

 

Thank you very much for your help :-)

Best

Dominik

[ef-fi]

Hi @Miska Is it possible to add support for OpenCL or Metal in the future ? so that M1 can utilize GPU for filter ?

[Miska]

21 minutes ago, ef-fi said:

Hi @Miska Is it possible to add support for OpenCL or Metal in the future ? so that M1 can utilize GPU for filter ?

 

OpenCL is too much graphics driven, given it's based on OpenGL. And not architecturally very suitable for HQPlayer.

 

Problem with Apple's Metal is that it is too much Apple-style with Swift and Objective-C APIs. While HQPlayer is C/C++ throughout.

 

[salaryman]

On 7/19/2021 at 8:12 PM, DomiJi said:

Hello HQPlayer Lovers 😁

 

i am so satisfied with Euphony and HQPlayer that i want to upgrade my old NUC8i5 to a new Cirrus7 with one of the following CPUs:

• Intel i9 10900
• Intel i9 11900
• AMD Ryzen 4750g

Because the price differences are very small i want to pic the best CPU for HQPlayer. Does HQPlayer profit from the more cores of the i9 10900 vs the lesser cores of the i9 11900?

 

Thank you very much for your help :-)

Best

Dominik

 

My system is 8-core 10700K + Z490M housing in HDPlex H3 passive case. It works perfect for 2-channel DSD256 + ASDM7EC.

I had tried to put a 10-core 10850K inside, but just got constant stutters.

Probably the case could not handle the heat dissipation then the CPU had to slow down.

So, there is a trade-off between passive cooling and powerful CPU.

 

For the AMD 4750G, I also tried it before in a Asrock X300 with active cooling, it could not provide the speed requirement of ASDM7EC, you may need to wait for 5700U or up.

[ef-fi]

Hi @Miska , Thanks for your reply.  What about HIP ? It looks promising.  At least, it can support both AMD and NVIDIA card.

 

It would be perfect to just have an Apple next gen Mac Mini (rumors that GPU will be powerful) which is quiet, efficient for HQP, and cost effective for fully dedicated machine for steaming.

 

*Sorry, I don't know how to reply in the same thread.

[Miska]

2 hours ago, ef-fi said:

Hi @Miska , Thanks for your reply.  What about HIP ? It looks promising.  At least, it can support both AMD and NVIDIA card.

 

ROCm/HIP has been already supported on HQPlayer Embedded for a while. For AMD only. Nvidia has been supported through CUDA for much longer.

 

2 hours ago, ef-fi said:

It would be perfect to just have an Apple next gen Mac Mini (rumors that GPU will be powerful) which is quiet, efficient for HQP, and cost effective for fully dedicated machine for steaming.

 

Is the GPU powerful at HPC double precision floating point workloads?

 

[ef-fi]

47 minutes ago, Miska said:

Is the GPU powerful at HPC double precision floating point workloads?

This site shows 650 GFLOPS. https://askgeek.io/en/gpus/Apple/M1-gpu for 8 cores. Rumors said that it could be at least double core count.

[Miska]

12 hours ago, ef-fi said:

This site shows 650 GFLOPS. https://askgeek.io/en/gpus/Apple/M1-gpu for 8 cores. Rumors said that it could be at least double core count.

 

We'll see how it performs on HQPlayer workloads if anybody ever implements a CUDA-style API for it. Looking at the MSL (Metal Shading Language) documentation, it looks like a lot geared for graphics, instead of HPC style tasks.

 

For example based on raw numbers, my AMD Radeon RX 6700XT should perform better than RTX2080 or RTX3060, but in practice it doesn't. I have a feeling that it doesn't have as good GPU multitasking as Nvidia. So it seems to require reloading an entire task every time, which makes performance of big tasks suffer a lot.

 

[Fleecyears]

Hi All,

 

I’ve just ordered the Truemetal UP10 passive case, which can easily accommodate some of the best CPUs and GPU in a complete fanless setup.

I know the Case can easily accommodate an RTX3080 Graphics card and something like the Intel i9-11900k or Ryzen equivalent (not sure what that would be). 
 

Any recommendations for the actual CPU (Intel / Ryzen) and GPU I can use to help push HQPlayer to the max?

 

Main aim is to use HQPlayer server and Roon server at say DSD512 or PCM1536, with some of the best sounding filters. This will then all be fed to a separate Roon endpoint.

 

Any feedback would be much appreciated as Truemetal are asking for the Actual CPU and GPU model, so they can design the heat pipes accordingly for my setup.

Appreciate your feedback.

 

[Fleecyears]

If it helps, would like the following to play flawlessly.

 

- Upsample everything to DSD512 or PCM1536

- Poly-sinc-xtr-lp filter
- ASDM7EC modulator

[k6davis]

  

1 hour ago, Fleecyears said:

If it helps, would like the following to play flawlessly.

 

- Upsample everything to DSD512 or PCM1536

- Poly-sinc-xtr-lp filter
- ASDM7EC modulator

 

The first thing to understand is that, presently, there is no CPU/GPU combo available that can upsample any DSD EC modulator to DSD 512 in real time. There is a fairly large number of CPUs that can upsample DSD EC modulators to DSD 256. 

 

Therefore, when it comes to DSD EC upsampling, we are at a plateau. It's up to each person whether you'd prefer to maximize your hardware (expenditure) on what is available now or wait to see if forthcoming CPU's will perform at settings that currently available CPUs cannot.

 

I have been running a i7-9700K for a few years now. With it (alone) I can play any file at EC DSD 256 with all of the medium and lighter load filters. I'm testing the poly-sinc-xtr-lp ASDM7EC combo you mentioned at DSD 256 x 48 right now with a 24bit 192kHz file and it's working fine.

 

Maximizing your CPU/GPU based on what is currently available will give your server some breathing room and offer you a greater selection of filter options, but it will fall short of your stated goals.

[Fleecyears]

Thanks K6Davis, been getting that feeling, but needed to double check.

 

If I leave out EC and only go with ASDM7, In terms of what's available today, would it be best to go with Intel i9 with a higher clock of 4.8 to 5.1Ghz or go with a top spec Ryzen and with either would I still need a good GPU?

 

Can't decide between Intel or AMD :-(

 

Also, does the choice of OS matter. eg. Windows vs Linux?

 

 

[Miska]

1 hour ago, Fleecyears said:

If I leave out EC and only go with ASDM7, In terms of what's available today, would it be best to go with Intel i9 with a higher clock of 4.8 to 5.1Ghz or go with a top spec Ryzen and with either would I still need a good GPU?

 

Can't decide between Intel or AMD :-(

 

Also, does the choice of OS matter. eg. Windows vs Linux?

 

If you go with AMD, you need to use Linux for decent performance.

 

With some filters you will still likely need a GPU. For HQPlayer Desktop you need to use Nvidia GPU, minimum RTX 3060, but I'd recommend to go with at least RTX 3080.

 

With HQPlayer Embedded you have also option of using AMD GPUs (Radeon RX 6000-series). But efficiency with AMD GPUs is not as good as with Nvidia.

 

[Rune]

53 minutes ago, Miska said:

With some filters you will still likely need a GPU. For HQPlayer Desktop you need to use Nvidia GPU, minimum RTX 3060, but I'd recommend to go with at least RTX 3080.

I am wondering which filter require a RTX 3080? Asking because I got a RTX 3090 yesterday and cannot find any filter that my GTX 1080 TI could not do.

[ted_b]

5 hours ago, Fleecyears said:

Can't decide between Intel or AMD :-(

Fleecyears, I didn't notice what dac you plan on using to get to 32fs but realize that the Holo May currently needs an Intel USB transceiver when you run the firmware that produces 32fs (i.e PCM1536). 

 

Edit: oops, saw it was a Denafrips, so nevermind.  :)

[Miska]

5 hours ago, Rune said:

I am wondering which filter require a RTX 3080? Asking because I got a RTX 3090 yesterday and cannot find any filter that my GTX 1080 TI could not do.

 

For example doing 48/96/192k content to 11.2M DSD with poly-sinc-xtr, poly-sinc-ext3, poly-sinc-gauss-xl(a). Maybe also sinc-L to DSD256. I'm not sure if even RTX 3090 can do those filters to DSD1024 rates. I don't have one, I need to check with RTX 3080 some time.

 

I don't think GTX 1080Ti is being manufactured anymore...

 

[Fleecyears]

Quick update, based on what Miska has said in another thread, he indicated it’s better to go with a CPU that has 12 cores for a 2 channel setup. Now the Ryzen 5950x has a lower TDP, but for a fan less setup, internal Low Thermal Resistance is more important according to Turemetal. 
 

Therefore, Turemetal have said the following setup will work nicely in a completely passive fanless setup. Please note they will need to fabricate a special heat transfer plate for the high powered RTX3060TI, and is something they have fabricated prior for other clients. Will add one month to the delivery time.

• Gigabyte RTX3060TI Graphics Card
• Intel Core i9-10920X X series processor (low thermal resistance and 12 cores)
• Asus Prime X299-A II LGA 2066 ATX Motherboard (X299 chipset - Important)
• Turemetal UP10 Heatsink Computer Case

Hopefully this setup will have sufficient grunt to power HQPlayer nicely. 

@Miska, your thoughts?

 

 

[Miska]

5 hours ago, Fleecyears said:

Quick update, based on what Miska has said in another thread, he indicated it’s better to go with a CPU that has 12 cores for a 2 channel setup. Now the Ryzen 5950x has a lower TDP, but for a fan less setup, internal Low Thermal Resistance is more important according to Turemetal. 
 

Therefore, Turemetal have said the following setup will work nicely in a completely passive fanless setup. Please note they will need to fabricate a special heat transfer plate for the high powered RTX3060TI, and is something they have fabricated prior for other clients. Will add one month to the delivery time.

• Gigabyte RTX3060TI Graphics Card
• Intel Core i9-10920X X series processor (low thermal resistance and 12 cores)
• Asus Prime X299-A II LGA 2066 ATX Motherboard (X299 chipset - Important)
• Turemetal UP10 Heatsink Computer Case

Hopefully this setup will have sufficient grunt to power HQPlayer nicely. 

@Miska, your thoughts?

 

 

 

If you use GPU offload for filters (not just for convolution), you don't need as many cores.

 

But that CPU is likely pretty good, high memory bandwidth etc. Only worry is not as high Turbo clocks (below 5 GHz).