Building a DIY Music Server

[Gavin1977]

This discussion has me thinking once again about the quality of power supply, for example great quality single rail linear power supply (Paul Hynes or Sean Jacobs) direct into an ITX motherboard with a DC Jack, or 4 pin Molex, vs going down the above route which needs a HDPLEX DC-DC converter (wastes the advantages of these high quality supplies?).

 

I keep coming back to the idea of a single rail for the main MB/CPU, then power separate PCI cards from smaller separate supplies like MPAudio ones.

 

I’m also very impressed with IanCanadas Life PO4 power supply (version 3 is out soon and is easy to integrate super caps) and I am considering using its configurable output to 13.2V to a DC/4-pin Molex ITX board (assuming it accepts that range)  LT3045 on the JCAT USB EX suggests it would accept 2 x 3.3v from the Life PO4.

 

That’s where my thoughts are presently going...

 

....so many different approaches to compare and I don’t think I could guess which would sound ‘best’.

[Nenon]

1 hour ago, dminches said:

Since you are only using the HDPlex to power the motherboard, is your 1.5A estimate reduced because you are powering the clock externally or is that only what the motherboard really needs?  I am using a Keces 20V 8A LPS for that purpose.  I guess that is really overkill.

The numbers I posted were from tests I've done before replacing the clock. 28-29W was the borderline. With a video card installed I needed about 32W. So, yes, if you have 22V or more 1.5A is enough. If you power it with 16V, you would need at least 2A. And it's always good to have some extra capacity. 

 

49 minutes ago, Gavin1977 said:

This discussion has me thinking once again about the quality of power supply, for example great quality single rail linear power supply (Paul Hynes or Sean Jacobs) direct into an ITX motherboard with a DC Jack, or 4 pin Molex, vs going down the above route which needs a HDPLEX DC-DC converter (wastes the advantages of these high quality supplies?).

 

I keep coming back to the idea of a single rail for the main MB/CPU, then power separate PCI cards from smaller separate supplies like MPAudio ones.

What do you think happens with that single rail that feeds the motherboard? The motherboard has to convert internally all the voltages with its own regulators. Essentially you have a similar circuit like the hdplex built into the motherboard, which is not necessarily better quality than the hdplex. Also, these motherboards are for low-powered CPUs. If that's your thing, you can give it a try. I am never going back to low powered CPUs after hearing what a server like this can do. 

 

[Dev]

13 minutes ago, Nenon said:

What do you think happens with that single rail that feeds the motherboard? The motherboard has to convert internally all the voltages with its own regulators. Essentially you have a similar circuit like the hdplex built into the motherboard, which is not necessarily better quality than the hdplex. Also, these motherboards are for low-powered CPUs. If that's your thing, you can give it a try. I am never going back to low powered CPUs after hearing what a server like this can do. 

 

motherboards still will have switching regulators even if you power it from the ATX, for example, RAM needs 1.2v or 1.5v or 1.6v which isn't part of ATX. There are other components which works on less than 3.3v for which it needs step-down regulators on the motherboard itself. There is absolutely no way out, unless one designs its own motherboard.

[Nenon]

1 minute ago, Dev said:

motherboards still will have switching regulators even if you power it from the ATX, for example, RAM needs 1.2v or 1.5v or 1.6v which isn't part of ATX. There are other components which works on less than 3.3v for which it needs step-down regulators on the motherboard itself. 

 

No question about that. 

[beautiful music]

22 hours ago, Nenon said:

 

Ultimately, there is only one way to find out, so here it is:

 

This is the ASUS WS C621E Sage Extreme motherboard with two Intel XEON SILVER 4210 CPUs that the Taiko Extreme uses inside an HDPlex case. It would be interesting to complete this build and compare with my other builds. Granted, I won't have the million small tweaks Emile has put in the Extreme, but I will apply all the stuff I have learned during my builds. Not trying to reach the Extreme but just to explore another route. I have a custom order Apacer RDIMM RAM coming in several weeks. Between now and then there is a lot of challenges I need to overcome. Don't ask me how I am going to passively cool down those CPUs for example. I don't know. There is no adaptor for the fclga3647 socket in the HDPlex or Streacom kits. I will have to build my own. I have several different Dynatron coolers coming my way as well as various cooling pipes and a pipe bending tool. Ideally, the CPU that is closer to the front of the chassis would be cooled by the left heatsink and the second CPU would be cooled by the right heatsink. That would be a heck of a project. 

 

Thank you @Nenon for this invaluable information and the double Xeon Processor build is what I'm looking for, stay safe.

[Nenon]

16 hours ago, beautiful music said:

Thank you @Nenon for this invaluable information and the double Xeon Processor build is what I'm looking for, stay safe.

 

This best thing I've seen on my laptop screen this week :). 

[One and a half]

6 minutes ago, Nenon said:

 

This best thing I've seen on my laptop screen this week :). 

Uh oh, CPU21 & CPU22 is approaching critical  

 

Would like to see the CPU temperatures if that's possible? 

[beautiful music]

57 minutes ago, Nenon said:

 

This best thing I've seen on my laptop screen this week :). 

 

That's good to know that you finished your Xeon build🤩.

 

Curious to know what is your CPU isolation settings for those double Xeon processors.

 

 

 

 

[Nenon]

39 minutes ago, beautiful music said:

 

That's good to know that you finished your Xeon build🤩.

 

Curious to know what is your CPU isolation settings for those double Xeon processors.

 

 

Finished? No. That build will take a few months to finish. I won't be done for a while. There is so many challenges! 

[beautiful music]

10 minutes ago, Nenon said:

 

Finished? No. That build will take a few months to finish. I won't be done for a while. There is so many challenges! 

 

Take your time Nenon and looking expectantly to your findings.

 

I like your perseverance and patience to build the ultimate server as much as you can. 

[beautiful music]

@Nenon I would like to know what's the power requirements for your new double Xeon Processor build?

[dctom]

On 4/15/2020 at 11:42 PM, Nenon said:

The numbers I posted were from tests I've done before replacing the clock. 28-29W was the borderline. With a video card installed I needed about 32W. So, yes, if you have 22V or more 1.5A is enough. If you power it with 16V, you would need at least 2A. And it's always good to have some extra capacity. 

 

What do you think happens with that single rail that feeds the motherboard? The motherboard has to convert internally all the voltages with its own regulators. Essentially you have a similar circuit like the hdplex built into the motherboard, which is not necessarily better quality than the hdplex. Also, these motherboards are for low-powered CPUs. If that's your thing, you can give it a try. I am never going back to low powered CPUs after hearing what a server like this can do. 

 

 

Great to read  about your server explorations.

I have only  just got around to experimenting with the CPU frequency of my server. I am using a low power i7 9700T CPU  35W on an AL OS server HDplex H5 ii case. 

I have a NUC naa end point and use HQP to upsample on the server, the cpu usage is pretty low averages about 5/6% across 8 cores runs at around 48deg C after a few hrs use, 40 deg below the recommended max temp. The case only gets slightly warm locally.

I believe you don't bother with upsampling Nenon. I am using the HQP poly-sinc-ext2 and ASDM7EC to run everything at 256 DSD

This has resulted in a further increase in sound quality on top of other improvements - 16GB apacer ram and  installing a 2Tb  NVMe PCIe for local storage. 

Using a low tdp cpu can produce excellent results - unfortunately it is nigh on impossible to compare results, especially at the present time. Maybe I will be able to obtain an i7 9700 or K to compare at some point.

[Gavin1977]

Perhaps the benefit of Nenons approach is that the full size motherboards he chooses have a dedicated 12V power to the processor... (unlike the DC/Molex single input style of solution I reference) if CPU lithography, typical speed and cache are the same then I would have thought that a i7 9700T would perform just as well as it’s higher powered counterpart(?), depending upon how many cores the operating system and playback software can utilise.   I know from experience that higher speed and larger cache processors sound better (so I’m also not interested in lower power Raspberry Pi solutions)... but do we need 39cores?  I have no experience to comment.

I’m limited to a single CPU <45w 9700T (or equiv) style solution anyhow as I don’t have the budget and prefer smaller boxes 🙂

 

I’ve posted the question on core count in the Gentoo Player thread as I wonder what the developer of this software thinks of the issue.

 

Did Emile f Taiko audio post a comparison of CPU’s somewhere?  Anyone got a link?

 

 

 

 

[dminches]

2 hours ago, Gavin1977 said:

Perhaps the benefit of Nenons approach is that the full size motherboards he chooses have a dedicated 12V power to the processor... (unlike the DC/Molex single input style of solution I reference) if CPU lithography, typical speed and cache are the same then I would have thought that a i7 9700T would perform just as well as it’s higher powered counterpart(?), depending upon how many cores the operating system and playback software can utilise.   I know from experience that higher speed and larger cache processors sound better (so I’m also not interested in lower power Raspberry Pi solutions)... but do we need 39cores?  I have no experience to comment.

I’m limited to a single CPU <45w 9700T (or equiv) style solution anyhow as I don’t have the budget and prefer smaller boxes 🙂

 

I’ve posted the question on core count in the Gentoo Player thread as I wonder what the developer of this software thinks of the issue.

 

Did Emile f Taiko audio post a comparison of CPU’s somewhere?  Anyone got a link?

 

 

 

 

 

Are you saying that m-ATX motherboards don’t allow for direct powering of the CPU?  I am using an m-ATX Supermicro mobo and I am powering directly from the 12V rail of my HDPlex 400W LPS.

 

[beautiful music]

3 hours ago, Gavin1977 said:

Did Emile f Taiko audio post a comparison of CPU’s somewhere?  Anyone got a link?

 

Here's a couple of posts from Emile.

 

https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/taiko-audio-sgm-extreme-the-crème-de-la-crème.27433/post-639048

 

https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/the-1st-sgm-server-evo-edition-in-hong-kong.26130/post-527310

[Gavin1977]

6 hours ago, beautiful music said:

 

Here's a couple of posts from Emile.

 

https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/taiko-audio-sgm-extreme-the-crème-de-la-crème.27433/post-639048

 

https://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/the-1st-sgm-server-evo-edition-in-hong-kong.26130/post-527310

Thanks Nenon - looks like a 7700k (With TDP limit set?) would be best for me then.

 

7 hours ago, dminches said:

 

Are you saying that m-ATX motherboards don’t allow for direct powering of the CPU?  I am using an m-ATX Supermicro mobo and I am powering directly from the 12V rail of my HDPlex 400W LPS.

 

Of course, the mainstream is that ITX and almost all m-ATX boards come with a dedicated 12V CPU connection that must be powered for the CPU to boot.  I’m just trying to get a handle on the technical reasoning why the multi rail approach reportedly sounds better, compared to a single very good quality power supply feeding a smaller ITX board that has only a DC jack or (slightly better) a 4 pin Molex onboard.  I am talking about powering the CPU only here, of course I understand that step down converters are required onboard motherboards with single voltage DC input to produce 5/3.3V (but won’t matter as much if your powering network and USB cards directly with their own dedicated linear power).

 

Would be logical that motherboard that accept a single DC range say 12-19V would be at a disadvantage due to some step down conversation required on the motherboard.  My NUC sounds pretty great - but I’ve never experimented with multi rail.

[Nenon]

55 minutes ago, Gavin1977 said:

Thanks Nenon - looks like a 7700k (With TDP limit set?) would be best for me then.

 

Of course, the mainstream is that ITX and almost all m-ATX boards come with a dedicated 12V CPU connection that must be powered for the CPU to boot.  I’m just trying to get a handle on the technical reasoning why the multi rail approach reportedly sounds better, compared to a single very good quality power supply feeding a smaller ITX board that has only a DC jack or (slightly better) a 4 pin Molex onboard.  I am talking about powering the CPU only here, of course I understand that step down converters are required onboard motherboards with single voltage DC input to produce 5/3.3V (but won’t matter as much if your powering network and USB cards directly with their own dedicated linear power).

 

Would be logical that motherboard that accept a single DC range say 12-19V would be at a disadvantage due to some step down conversation required on the motherboard.  My NUC sounds pretty great - but I’ve never experimented with multi rail.

 

Isolating components with their own rails just sounds better. Components generate noise that contaminate the power. And if you are using one rail only, every component would suffer from the noise the other components generate. That's the simplest logical explanation. There is a lot more into it, though. The NUC sounds good but the builds in this thread are on a completely different level. 

[Gavin1977]

Thanks - great to have answers like this

[Audiophile Neuroscience]

1 hour ago, Gavin1977 said:

I’m just trying to get a handle on the technical reasoning why the multi rail approach reportedly sounds better, compared to a single very good quality power supply feeding a smaller ITX board that has only a DC jack or (slightly better) a 4 pin Molex onboard.  I am talking about powering the CPU only here, of course I understand that step down converters are required onboard motherboards with single voltage DC input to produce 5/3.3V (but won’t matter as much if your powering network and USB cards directly with their own dedicated linear power).

 

I guess that makes sense if you have separate linear psu for every critical component. The theory of having multi-rail AFAIK is to achieve that separation between component parts on the MOBO and a LPSU is said to reject more retrograde noise spreading to pollute other components on other rails.

 

It also depends on what you consider critical components. I have a separate LPS Ulracap for the OS SSD, Music SSD,, PPA sound card and isoregen ( I do not use a network card, I don't stream). The cpu is powered by a HDPlex and the ultracaps powered by a JS2.All 12v cables are shielded including the mobo loom and other cables are quad star oyaide/canare or oyaide/belden. Everything is fed by shielded power cords, shielded dedicated power lines and dedicated sub panel with filtering

[lmitche]

4 hours ago, Nenon said:

The NUC sounds good but the builds in this thread are on a completely different level. 

I don't necessarily disagree with this, but I think some more detail is important. A well tuned and powered NUC can be very hard to beat.  A major reason that a NUC sounds so good is that they are based on a System-On-a Chip(SOC). NUC SOCs are designed for laptops, and are intended to be powered by batteries, and automatically switch off unused circuits to conserve power during laptop operation. An example of this is support for temperature-compensated refresh (TCR) which reduces SODIMM power utilization on some models when enabled in BIOS. Likewise the reduced distance between components within the chip reduces latency, and impedance adding to SQ.

 

Mini-ITX, Micro-ATX and ATX motherboards most often use two chips, the processor and Platform Controller Hub (PCH) that do the work of the one chip in a NUC. Some motherboards allow the disablement of the PCH and doing so greatly enhances SQ and puts these boards on, at least, an even footing with a SOC based NUC. Lastly many Intel processors for the consumer market include on board GPUs. Most AMD Ryzen and Xeon based solutions do not. The absence of a GPU is audible, and on Intel chips disablement of the GPU through software is possible as a GPU and monitor is not required for music playback. This works on NUCs as well.

 

From what I read, Emile's Taiko Audio Extreme appears to have a NUC based competitor in the Grimm audio MU1. It will be interesting to see how this competition between these two Dutch companies shakes out.

[auricgoldfinger]

1 hour ago, lmitche said:

Some motherboards allow the disablement of the PCH and doing so greatly enhances SQ

 

How can one determine if this is possible on a particular motherboard?  Is it disabled physically?

 

1 hour ago, lmitche said:

The absence of a GPU is audible, and on Intel chips disablement of the GPU through software is possible as a GPU and monitor is not required for music playback.

 

Is the GPU disabled in the BIOS?

 

Thanks, Larry.

[lmitche]

2 hours ago, auricgoldfinger said:

 

How can one determine if this is possible on a particular motherboard?  Is it disabled physically?

 

 

Is the GPU disabled in the BIOS?

 

Thanks, Larry.

In some motherboards the PCH can be disabled in Bios.

 

The GPU can be disabled in the OS.

[gererick]

Presumably whether or not one can or cannot disable the GPU in the operating system depends on the operating system. 

 

For example, per Nenon, Euphony is a closed operating system and changes are not possible.  Euphony is the best-sounding operating system, in my setup.  Regardless of GPU enabled or disabled.  And Euphony sounds best with a powerful processor, which I am guessing rules out a lot of NUCs.

 

Then there is the question of whether (i) motherboards that allow the PCH to be disabled sound better - after the PCH has been disabled - than (ii) other motherboards that do not allow the PCH to be disabled.  The motherboards in clause (ii) may have other SQ advantages that more than offset.   

[Dev]

1 hour ago, lmitche said:

In some motherboards the PCH can be disabled in Bios.

 

 

Larry, this is interesting but I wouldn't think motherboard will allow the entire chipset to be disabled. There could be parts of it that can be disabled, for example, the sata controller or the PCI lanes, but the entire chipset ? Can you site some example on which motherboard allows this ?

[gererick]

Quote

And whether or not any such motherboard that does allow it is any good for music playback, compared to other great-sounding motherboard options that don't allow it.