Hi,

I'm desperate to upgrade, and looking to go for a DARC Dual XEON Ultimate LE machine (reviewed positively by SOS), my key expectations are below:

• stability
  
• power (current Q6660 gets maxed out with the multiple VSTs I use)
  
• memory (fed up with the XP memory limit)
  

Would appreciate answers to the below please;

• has anyone any experience with DARC as this company and this machine
  
• any reasons NOT to go for it (as opposed to a i7 920)?
  
• any issues with Cubase
  

After hours of researching this I'd really appreciate some concise (and friendly) advice.

Cheers

I'd be interested in any replies to this as well, as I am wondering why xeons are overlooked in favour of i3, i5, i7

I seem to remember reading that xeons run much hotter and hence more cooling is needed?

Quote Alex Evans:

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any reasons NOT to go for it (as opposed to a i7 920)?

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What reason do you have to go for it OVER a 950 (or more to the point a 2600k)?

Quote Alex Evans:

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any issues with Cubase

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Nope.

Quote OneWorld:

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I'd be interested in any replies to this as well, as I am wondering why xeons are overlooked in favour of i3, i5, i7

I seem to remember reading that xeons run much hotter and hence more cooling is needed?

---

Nope, modern Xeons are just desktop chips with a few extra pipelines enabled to allow multiway data exchange between the memory cores... no extra cooling over the standard solutions used for the desktop chips.

Why are they overlooked? Cost.

Very, very few users need to go Xeon and those who think they do would save money by simply buying a mid-range machine now and then upgrading it 2/3 years down the line.

All of the dual Xeon 4 cores get spanked by the overclocked 2600k's (I don't have any benchmarks as I've not done a Xeon rig in a while but Scott ADK's figures are here : http://www.adkproaudio.com/benchmarks.cfm Second graph down). So your looking at 6 core Xeons and those things are a hell of a lot more costly than the desktop breathen.

The only people I'd advise to go Xeon over the last 10 months or so would be music for media guys who have vast orchestral templates in clients like VSL (I have users with 30GB templates at start up) who need and use the extra memory allocation on a daily basis. Due to the price of the chips and the ECC memory used your talking £3k+ before you even start spec'in in the fun stuff.

This however will change when X79 lands next week. Another performance jump on the 2600's and support for upto 32GB at launch on the board will make these I reckon ideal for those doing music for film work and don't wish to fork out the cost of a small car on a new P.C. to do so.

Quote:

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has anyone any experience with DARC as this company and this machine

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i have a darc ultimate with a few changes i asked for. and got a free cpu upgrade as well as they had to wait for the second gfx card to run my tv.

Fantastic, thanks, could you share your experiences of the machine's performance please?

Cheers

not had any real problems with it and i threw everything i had at it when i got it and just got board after a while as the plug ins were in the 100s and still loads left in the tank i use nuendo tho.

it does not make much noise either even with the ati 5850 in there and i went with darc as i did not want to build it and they were using the same tyan board i wanted so i got them to build it for me.

also while waiting for the second gfx card i even got them to chop full size pcie gfx cards to fit in the x1 slot but it would only work in consumer boards for some reason and not in the tyan board as it does a self check when it starts up and would not work with a cut card in there so had to wait for the second card in the end.

Quote Pete Kaine:

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Quote Alex Evans:

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any reasons NOT to go for it (as opposed to a i7 920)?

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What reason do you have to go for it OVER a 950 (or more to the point a 2600k)?

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See below.

Quote Pete Kaine:

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Quote Alex Evans:

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any issues with Cubase

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Nope.

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Thanks.

Quote Pete Kaine:

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Quote OneWorld:

---

I'd be interested in any replies to this as well, as I am wondering why xeons are overlooked in favour of i3, i5, i7

I seem to remember reading that xeons run much hotter and hence more cooling is needed?

---

Nope, modern Xeons are just desktop chips with a few extra pipelines enabled to allow multiway data exchange between the memory cores... no extra cooling over the standard solutions used for the desktop chips.

Why are they overlooked? Cost.

Very, very few users need to go Xeon and those who think they do would save money by simply buying a mid-range machine now and then upgrading it 2/3 years down the line.

All of the dual Xeon 4 cores get spanked by the overclocked 2600k's (I don't have any benchmarks as I've not done a Xeon rig in a while but Scott ADK's figures are here : http://www.adkproaudio.com/benchmarks.cfm Second graph down). So your looking at 6 core Xeons and those things are a hell of a lot more costly than the desktop breathen.

The only people I'd advise to go Xeon over the last 10 months or so would be music for media guys who have vast orchestral templates in clients like VSL (I have users with 30GB templates at start up) who need and use the extra memory allocation on a daily basis. Due to the price of the chips and the ECC memory used your talking £3k+ before you even start spec'in in the fun stuff.

This however will change when X79 lands next week. Another performance jump on the 2600's and support for upto 32GB at launch on the board will make these I reckon ideal for those doing music for film work and don't wish to fork out the cost of a small car on a new P.C. to do so.

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Thanks for this info, appreciated. Though herein lies the confusion. The benchmarks there are pretty conclusive, but I was framing my plans for a Xeon based on Martin Wlaker's reviews and the associated benchmarks here DARC Ultimate LE DAW.

I realise it's not quite like for like because that review refers only to i7 920 I think, (and I could have severely misread the benchmarks) but is the gap between 920 and the 2600k that huge?

Finally really interested in those new boards you mentioned though because it will be my main working Music DAW I didn't want to be an early adopter *in case*. (Unless someone by some chance has it already?).

Appreciate the help here.

Quote Alex Evans:

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I realise it's not quite like for like because that review refers only to i7 920 I think, (and I could have severely misread the benchmarks) but is the gap between 920 and the 2600k that huge?

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Yeah, 20% - 30% jump on the previous generation depending upon how the system is configured. I think I recall Martin even passing comment in his section last month in regards to the performance leaps we're seeing each generation.

Quote Alex Evans:

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Finally really interested in those new boards you mentioned though because it will be my main working Music DAW I didn't want to be an early adopter *in case*. (Unless someone by some chance has it already?).

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I've played with a few boards and it feels nice and stable so far but the's still some way to go before the clear winners for audio emerge. I'm holding out for a particular board from one of the manufactures that hasn't landed in this country yet, due to their logistics also having problems with this Taiwan flooding of late but the board in question ticks all the boxes for me in regards to what I feel audio users need, so we'll see when they hit our shores. I'm hoping for a sample to play with next week so we shall see although the NDA is due to be lifted shortly, so expect a deluge of information in the next week or so.

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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Quote Pete Kaine:

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I've played with a few boards and it feels nice and stable so far but the's still some way to go before the clear winners for audio emerge. I'm holding out for a particular board from one of the manufactures that hasn't landed in this country yet, due to their logistics also having problems with this Taiwan flooding of late but the board in question ticks all the boxes for me in regards to what I feel audio users need, so we'll see when they hit our shores. I'm hoping for a sample to play with next week so we shall see although the NDA is due to be lifted shortly, so expect a deluge of information in the next week or so.

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I'm hoping the x79 series will tempt me into upgrading, the increased ram capacity will be great and I'm hoping they include some features from the z68 boards like the SSD caching and graphics switching.

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http://www.williammorrismusic.com

Quote Alex Evans:

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Thanks for this info, appreciated. Though herein lies the confusion. The benchmarks there are pretty conclusive, but I was framing my plans for a Xeon based on Martin Wlaker's reviews and the associated benchmarks here DARC Ultimate LE DAW.

I realise it's not quite like for like because that review refers only to i7 920 I think, (and I could have severely misread the benchmarks) but is the gap between 920 and the 2600k that huge?

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Hi Alex!

Only just noticed this, and so I should point out that I have in fact reviewed a PC for SOS based around Intel's 2600k processor, the 'Rain Recording Nimbus Project Studio Plus' in our June 2011 issue:

www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun11/articles/nimbus-project-studio-plus.htm

Here's my updated chart showing relative performance, although I should point out that this 2600k had been safely Turbo boosted to 4.5GHz (as have many similar systems from specialist audio PC builders):



Hope this helps!


Martin

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YewTreeMagic

Quote Martin Walker:

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Quote Alex Evans:

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Thanks for this info, appreciated. Though herein lies the confusion. The benchmarks there are pretty conclusive, but I was framing my plans for a Xeon based on Martin Wlaker's reviews and the associated benchmarks here <a href="/sos/mar10/articles/darcultimatele.htm" target="_blank">DARC Ultimate LE DAW</a>.

I realise it's not quite like for like because that review refers only to i7 920 I think, (and I could have severely misread the benchmarks) but is the gap between 920 and the 2600k that huge?

---

Hi Alex!

Only just noticed this, and so I should point out that I have in fact reviewed a PC for SOS based around Intel's 2600k processor, the 'Rain Recording Nimbus Project Studio Plus' in our June 2011 issue:

<a href="/sos/jun11/articles/nimbus-project-studio-plus.htm" target="_blank">www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun11/articles/nimbus-project-studio-plus.htm& lt;/a>

Here's my updated chart showing relative performance, although I should point out that this 2600k had been safely Turbo boosted to 4.5GHz (as have many similar systems from specialist audio PC builders):


Hope this helps!


Martin

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Pretty conclusive results .. 2600k is the only choice right now until the new boards are released.

Quote Martin Walker:

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Quote Alex Evans:

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Thanks for this info, appreciated. Though herein lies the confusion. The benchmarks there are pretty conclusive, but I was framing my plans for a Xeon based on Martin Wlaker's reviews and the associated benchmarks here <a href="/sos/mar10/articles/darcultimatele.htm" target="_blank">DARC Ultimate LE DAW</a>.

I realise it's not quite like for like because that review refers only to i7 920 I think, (and I could have severely misread the benchmarks) but is the gap between 920 and the 2600k that huge?

---

Hi Alex!

Only just noticed this, and so I should point out that I have in fact reviewed a PC for SOS based around Intel's 2600k processor, the 'Rain Recording Nimbus Project Studio Plus' in our June 2011 issue:

<a href="/sos/jun11/articles/nimbus-project-studio-plus.htm" target="_blank">www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun11/articles/nimbus-project-studio-plus.htm& lt;/a>

Here's my updated chart showing relative performance, although I should point out that this 2600k had been safely Turbo boosted to 4.5GHz (as have many similar systems from specialist audio PC builders):



Hope this helps!


Martin

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Hi Martin!

Thanks a bunch, that really helped me with the apparent conflict of benchmark figures I was getting.

Thanks again to all posters, a 2600k it is then! (Likely from RAIN).

i don't think it would beat these xeons but look at the price and the sm board i was looking at can take 4 of them.

http://ark.intel.com/products/53580/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E7-8870-(30M-Cach e-2_40-GHz-6_40-GTs-Intel-QPI)

Quote:

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although I should point out that this 2600k had been safely Turbo boosted to 4.5GHz

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is that the same as with my xeons as there 2.4 but if the going gets tough they auto turbo bost to 2.6 in the bios if it is turned on.

Advanced Technologies
Intel® Turbo Boost Technology

Quote Will_m:

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I'm hoping the x79 series will tempt me into upgrading, the increased ram capacity will be great and I'm hoping they include some features from the z68 boards like the SSD caching and graphics switching.

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The RST feature has dropped off the X79 feature set but some board makers are packaging thier own versions into the designs (see ASUS's attempt at this on the p9 boards). Graphics switching I can't remember if this is on the feature set or not, but I haven't seen any with onboard graphics in my office yet, so perhaps not... I'm sure it'll come up in due course.

Anyhow the platform launched this morning and I'm still waiting for board and cooler solutions from a number of firms.

Zero day reviews can be found here : http://www.anandtech.com/print/5089 & http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/32591-intel-core-i7-3960x-extreme-editio n-cpu/?page=1

We've got a gaming rig on Hexus being reviewed but it get's the result I'd expect... I.e. too costly for gaming when you don't see the performance increase and a bit noisy. Both to be expected seeing how few games take into consideration the extra cores available and the lack of cooling kits for this board at launch. I really can see this being the chipset for performance Audio/Video users (especially as more software comes out using AVX extensions) so we'll have to wait a bit longer until the appropriate reviews come out testing it for our needs rather than the majority of home users.

Quote necromunger:

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Quote:

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although I should point out that this 2600k had been safely Turbo boosted to 4.5GHz

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is that the same as with my xeons as there 2.4 but if the going gets tough they auto turbo bost to 2.6 in the bios if it is turned on.

Advanced Technologies
Intel® Turbo Boost Technology

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Nah, when Martin's had them it's a proper overclock rather than just a clock multiplyer jump. You'd expect the whole subsystem to be ramped up rather than the CPU in this case.

The Quad Xeons are a generation behind the 2600k chips so the's other differences in what's going on in there. The 6 core Xeons however are a different kettle of fish but priced very much accordingly, hence why the 2600k is the best value for under 3k but if you really need the extra cpu/memory then your looking at 3k+ (and I've seen them fleshed out for more than twice that price) for a well loaded out dual Hexcore Xeon system.

Xeon boards, being server solutions are not really designed to be overclocked and a bin jump of just one notch (i.e. 2.4 - 2.6 for instance) from turbo boost I really wouldn't expect anyone to notice except you might gain 2 or 3 channels in use... The is however one noteable Xeon overclocking board and it's benched performance scores are great all round for audio/video/gaming but at a starting price of £500 it's another large chunk of cash on the pile.

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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

its a good job my mobo is six core ready then

http://www.tyan.com/product_SKU_spec.aspx?ProductType=MB&pid=633&S KU=600000023

Just saw this thread! Necromunger with a motherboard that can take 2x 3.4GHz 6 core, 12 thread CPUs and 96GB of DDR3 RAM I don't think you have to worry too much about performance just yet

The setup is looking good, GTA running nicely, we never get to test systems out in that way though of course (Crysis 2 across 3 screens looks amazing... I've been told;-)

As Pete said, the dual Xeons are really for people looking for the big VSL setups where starting templates can hit 30GB+, the new X79 chipset will be the new go to and the dual Xeon version of this (with the possible unlocked cores) will be out of this world performance and probably only needed by the guys doing video as well (or perhaps VSL can create something new to push the limits!)

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www.directresolution.com
home of the DARC audio computer

Yeah, it'll give you a very nice upgrade path at some point in the future.

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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Quote directresolution.com:

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The setup is looking good, GTA running nicely, we never get to test systems out in that way though of course (Crysis 2 across 3 screens looks amazing... I've been told;-)

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If it can run GTA properly it must good, that game has to be the worst performing port ever

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http://www.williammorrismusic.com

Quote directresolution.com:

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Just saw this thread! Necromunger with a motherboard that can take 2x 3.4GHz 6 core, 12 thread CPUs and 96GB of DDR3 RAM I don't think you have to worry too much about performance just yet

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Hell... he'd need all that to just to run Crysis on the 32"

Quote directresolution.com:

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The setup is looking good, GTA running nicely, we never get to test systems out in that way though of course (Crysis 2 across 3 screens looks amazing... I've been told;-)

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It has to be said that Crysis across 3 screens in 3d is absolutly awesome

(until the electric bill comes in)

Quote directresolution.com:

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the dual Xeon version of this (with the possible unlocked cores) will be out of this world performance and probably only needed by the guys doing video as well (or perhaps VSL can create something new to push the limits!)

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I've no doubt what-so-ever that they will!

Quote Will_m:

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If it can run GTA properly it must good, that game has to be the worst performing port ever

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Quoted for truth

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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Quote:

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If it can run GTA properly it must good, that game has to be the worst performing port ever

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well i cant set the gfx to max as my gfx card is not 15 feet long but the cpus running the game is at about 10%

You're allowed to put a soldering iron on a sofa ?!!?!!




Martin

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YewTreeMagic

Worse things than solder have been on that sofa...

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YewTreeMagic

Quote:

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You're allowed to put a soldering iron on a sofa ?!!?!!

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lol yes i can it was bloody freezing in the shed. but i posted the rong pic and cant find the other

tho if you have naff wifi and can unscrew the antenna at the back stick one of these on it and watch how far it goes.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/120797568656?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&_trksi d=p3984.m1497.l2649#ht_2883wt_1163

Decided on the 2600k, just wondered who you'd recommed me to buy it from, (or if you know any freelance builders in London)?

Thanks in advance,

Well the most obvious supplier of PC components for someone building themselves a music computer is Scan, largely because their prices are keen yet their staff are extremely helpful (that sound all right to you Pete? )


Martin

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YewTreeMagic

We're also far too modest to comment on such accolades.


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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Thanks Martin, appreciated.

Peter could you supply the parts assembled, OR would you be able to help with the overclocking? Not sure how difficult it is?

Hi Alex,

http://www.scan.co.uk/shops/audio/bundles

Bundle on the right would probably meet your requirements I reckon. It's the heart of our standard rig solutions overclocked, tested and shipped out for you to drop into whatever case set up you wish.

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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Pete, I just clicked on your link. You might want to check the pricing on the web site, looks like the VAT inc and exc prices have been reversed.

Andy

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When the going gets weird, the Weird turn Pro.

Yeah, sorry. That page isn't acturly public currently (apart from this link) as we're doing some work on the layout and managed to drop the bundles completely on the last redesign. Your right through it's the wrong way round, and I'll get it on the to do list in due course. I'm not having a good week web wise it has to be said... already managed to total the blog, short term whilst trying to install a new support forum. Think I'm going to loose myself some security rights the way todays going!

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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Quote Pete Kaine:

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Hi Alex,

http://www.scan.co.uk/shops/audio/bundles

Bundle on the right would probably meet your requirements I reckon. It's the heart of our standard rig solutions overclocked, tested and shipped out for you to drop into whatever case set up you wish.

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Thanks Pete, just wondered if I could have yours or anyone else's thoughts on the board you have (Asus P8Z68-V PRO Motherboard) compared to Gigabyte Z68. FWIW I would be looking at getting 12gb ram.

The Gigabyte's are fine on that generation but the overclocking isn't as well behaved as the Asus and the DPC is higher.

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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Quote Pete Kaine:

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The Gigabyte's are fine on that generation but the overclocking isn't as well behaved as the Asus and the DPC is higher.

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Thanks Pete,

Quote Pete Kaine:

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Hi Alex,

http://www.scan.co.uk/shops/audio/bundles

Bundle on the right would probably meet your requirements I reckon. It's the heart of our standard rig solutions overclocked, tested and shipped out for you to drop into whatever case set up you wish.

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Hi Pete,

On those bundles can you change the memory amount to 16GB and also will those motherboards (Asus P8Z68-V PRO) accommodate the 3960s?

Cheers

Hi Alex,

Adding in another couple of sticks of memory would be easy enough. However you require a X79 chipset based motherboard in order to use the 3960 for which I'm working on a bundle currently.

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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Thanks Pete, I'd like to buy today latest this week, how long do you need to get the bundle together please?

Cheers

I'll fire you over a P.M. shortly with the details rather than continue to off topic this thread.

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ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog