Ha, it's a chili fest!


Hehe, not my location, just some past history and attachments. I do remember the Great Cinci Chili War though... (been there, ate that)
Mmm, Montgomery Inn bbq too!


Where for chili in Ft. Myers? (I drop by there on occasion)


Knew of a good chili place in Old Town Alexandria VA, TX theme but they did some decent Cinci chili, Lone Star Cafe iirc. (I get around)
Prefer to make my own 5-way these days, lots of peppers and a touch of cinnamon (not big on chocolate in my chili). 

Too bad about the hot sauce. Great for the sinuses (and, so I'm told, when one has to eat one's hat). 

now that was funny (hat) guess only you and i will know what that means..
i cant remember in Ft myers it was a skyline havent lived there in 17 yrs i think. (95) man i miss my boat
i actually lived on an island called Pine Isl right behind Sanibel. house on a canal would take me like 15 minutes to get to Sanibel by boat. i miss my boat
no point to one up here get maybe 3 months of use out of it and have to trailer it hours away to get to a lake.. forget it.
cheaper to rent if you actually get to the lake..
funny i seemed to have more time for that back then than now.

I'm sure he's a nice guy. However, he didn't start by trying to be helpful. He started by stating a position not relative to the question at hand and it took a few post to get him to climb off that soapbox and give an answer (well half a vague answer). If a 'fool and his money are soon parted' then the person wanting to part them from it adopts the position to see everyone as a fool (such is the nature of those dependant on selling their wares).  His implications unfortunately say more about his character to me than what he attempts to impeach me with.

So in the many tests I've read that isn't ADK's it appears the 2.0-6c is a better choice than the 2.4-4c. (well he did say 'almost' when he declared speed over cores). However, I am looking more at a single 8c now.  So in that way we can consider him helpful in a sense. The 2.6 looks pretty good since you can pick one up around 15-1600.
It appears that gamers hate these xeon chips because of the belief that you can't overclock them. However, I have run accross some that do and tell me the only problem in doing so is that the lifespan of it is cut drastically. I don't overclock. In the past when I did all it seemed to do for me was increase the likelihood of system crashes. Video people like these chips because they are more stable. I like stable too. I also found information on the 3.1Xeon that says the boost to 3.8 diminishes to 3.3 when run in pairs. Perhaps that wasn't taken into consideration with some tests looking only for speed.

i7's are great chips. I don't see any dual motherboards for them though and then there is the archetectural difference concerning FSB/DMA. This is much like the difference in PCI and PCIe to me and seems to be where it's all headed.

I don't consider myself an expert in any of this though. So I present these ideas for open discussion and then when possible actually try them. Education is not cheap either. But what I'm most skeptical of are those that insist they're experts and gurus (and their supporters).

BTW, Lastnight, I ran a simple test of recording ten vst and two external midi tracks using the largest samples I could find along with two fx from the DAW and at one point I did see a 48% CPU usage which cycled down almost immediately. But except for this simple test, I don't run ten tracks of vst samples. I usually run 2-3 at the most with other tracks. I also do our audio vocals with an outboard digital recorder and plan on using the workstation more for midi and mixdown. And considering that i7's seemed to have peaked in their development, I can always pick one up on the dump down the road.

So in the many tests I've read that isn't ADK's it appears the 2.0-6c is a better choice than the 2.4-4c. (well he did say 'almost' when he declared speed over cores). However, I am looking more at a single 8c now.  So in that way we can consider him helpful in a sense. The 2.6 looks pretty good since you can pick one up around 15-1600.

The trouble is the tests made outside of our tiny audio community have very little to do with real time audio and will be misleading.  Server platforms are tested using server centric or HPC applications that naturally lend themselve to multi threaded use, so with those tests, more cores will win.  And in audio this same situation occurs only when the load is distributed among many light load plug ins, such as doing a large mix with many tracks and real time processing.  Using only a few very heavy soft synth loads is a different story.


Scott is honestly one of the best resources here, and while I agree his approach may have been abrasive, his advice should not be written off.  For MIDI / soft synth use, you will be better off with higher clock speed at the expense of core count.  I think ultimately his point was that a high clock i7 will outperform your multi socket server platform for way less money for what you are intending to use it for.

Stipes Vigilo

I don't run ten tracks of vst samples. I usually run 2-3 at the most with other tracks. I also do our audio vocals with an outboard digital recorder and plan on using the workstation more for midi and mixdown

 
 
all the more reason my first statement to you is and will always be 100% correct
 

Xeons for any reason are an absolute waste of your money send the boord back and get a refund.

a single 3930K overclocked to 4.5GHz will kill that Xeon until you get into DUAL 3.1GHz.
no reason at all for dual Xeons with audio. maybe just maybe if you are using Vienna's Mir and 3/4 of thier library

 
as mentioned the benchmarks you may have seen have NOTHING to do with audio.. aside from mine and i didnt make up th test
came from here
www.dawbench.com
 

That implies one would know my entire use for it.
I've only given what is relative to this posit.

Speed performance in and of itself as an isolate might be impressive, but it is not the whole process.

Still, no one has offered any information on the correlation of dual chips. And it seems unfair to use any test designed for a single processor only as the benchmark for a pair. Seems to me that a different test is in order and then see how the single stacks up to that. But if we continue to use the same philosophy on something outside of that philosophy we can only find what we chose to find before we started the test.
So what intrigues me the most with these chips are that you can run them pairs and that you have direct memory access eliminating the fsb (or more accurately, that they do that already). Like pcie, this seems to make the case toward direct connections that earlier chips such as the i series lack.

I have a couple of powerful keyboards that run off little embedded Atom CPU's and this tells me, the chip is fundamentally not the problem. They use the Linux kernal though which seems to make it efficient. So while we race for faster pushed to its limits, there is another way that's simpler and more efficient. Seriously, as musicians we're stuck using gamer mentality parts with modified overlayed CAD programs running a kernel designed for banking.

Given these new technologies, it seems like an optimum time to step back out of this box they've put us all in. And if this out of the box view and off the wall questioning can do something, I'm willing to try.

let me prove my point..

show me a screen shot of your cores working while using sonar

alt+ctrl+del then task manager then performance
put up a screen shot of it.. and FYI i know EXACTLY what it will look like

first you are in an audio forum  so its all about audio
but ok you want video editing benchmarks i got those as well..

dude, fact is is your spent a ton of money for a very slow system and you will continue to debate this until you fingers fall off to make yourself believe or feel better about what you have done.

there is not a single test you can come up with including server tests that would show either of the dual xeon options beating a single affordable 6 core processor period.
i have been doing this 15 yrs (audio/video and in the past gaming and servers) as a biz and longer before that as an employee.

and thanks woog and Noldar!