[ddots-l] Re: Ultimate DAW!
- From: "Neville Peter" <neville@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2012 15:40:04 -0400
Man I wish I had the funds for all that power!
May the Peace of God which passes all understanding guard your heart and
mind in Christ Jesus. God bless you!
Website http://www.nevillepeter.com
Email neville@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Phone 407-222-4488
Web store http://www.nevillepeter.com/store
-----Original Message-----
From: ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ddots-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Chris Smart
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2012 3:27 PM
To: midimag@xxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: ddots-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [ddots-l] Ultimate DAW!
Take a look at this super powerful DAW, reviewed in Sound on Sound's August
issue.
Chris
Scan 3XS Intel SAX6 PowerDAW PC
Music Computer
Published in SOS August 2012
Scan's new hex-core machine offers huge amounts of processing power and RAM.
Is it the perfect studio PC?
Martin Walker
Scan seem to have carved out a fairly unique niche in the PC marketplace,
not only offering a comprehensive range of digital audio workstations,
gaming PCs, video editing and CAD workstations and media entertainment
systems (all of which come under the 'Scan 3XS' moniker), but also stocking
a huge range of components that they sell to other specialist professional
and home PC builders alike. Their audio specialists therefore have an
enviable choice of components with which to check compatibility, as well as
excellent access to the parts manufacturers themselves.
This particular review model is based around Intel's i7 3930K Sandy Bridge
CPU, whose six physical cores and six virtual ones offer a huge amount of
processing power for the musician, especially since this one has been
carefully overclocked beyond its stock speed of 3.2GHz to a massive 4.4GHz.
The chosen Asus motherboard is also unusual for a single CPU model in
offering two banks of quad-channel RAM slots, enabling those with huge
memory requirements (such as Vienna Symphonic Library users aiming to create
full orchestral scores) to install up to 64GB, although the review model was
fitted with a more modest 16GB.
Under The Bonnet
I've heard a lot of praise aimed at the Swedish-designed Fractal Design
Refine cases, and I can now see why. Most builders opt for the smaller R3
model, but given the power and cooling requirements of this 12-core monster,
Scan chose the rather more imposing XL version, here in Black Pearl but also
available in Titanium Grey as an option. This case is built like a tank from
heavy steel, coupled with a lining of dense sound-deadening materials for
its main panel surfaces, while the hinged front door is also acoustically
lined and closed via a magnetic catch, with an elegant blue illuminated
on/off switch at top front, along with two handy USB 2 and two USB
3 ports.
Case cooling is taken care of by of two low-noise 140mm fans (one mounted on
the case front panel and one on the rear) and one massive 180mm fan at upper
back, at a close to horizontal angle.
Remember, the larger the fan, the slower it needs to turn and the lower its
noise contribution. The 625-watt Enermax power supply also houses its own
120mm cooling fan with integral speed control for low noise. Overall, this
case should last a lifetime, although I wouldn't fancy moving it after
initial installation, as it has an impressive size and weight.
There's a wealth of rear-panel connections, which are augmented by two USB 2
and two USB 3 ports mounted on the top of the case.
Inside, I found possibly the neatest wiring I've ever seen, with all cables
beautifully grouped into several looms. There was also plenty of expansion
room for those who need it, with seven empty hard drive bays and a further
three 5.25-inch drive bays still available on the front panel beneath the
supplied Samsung 22x DVD-RW Writer. Four of the eight RAM sockets were
filled by the 16GB of high-quality Corsair RAM, and I was also pleased to
see that, despite the huge Thermalright Archon air cooler mounted on the CPU
with its associated low-speed 140mm fan, all four empty RAM sockets were
still easily accessible for those who want to add more later on.
The Asus V-Pro P9X79 motherboard features Intel's X79 chip set, and has been
available for about six months (new enough to have plenty of the latest
features, but established enough for any issues to have been ironed out).
Compared with the previous Z68 chip set, the
X79 supports the newer LGA2011 Sandy Bridge CPUs and quad-channel rather
than dual-channel memory architecture, which should help to boost
performance for heavy users of samples. This motherboard also boasts its own
SSD Caching, USB 3 Boost for even faster external data transfers, and a
unique BIOS Flashback update that lets you update your motherboard using a
USB flash drive and a single rear-panel button press.
It does, however, lack PCI slots, so anyone with a good but elderly
soundcard should perhaps look for an alternative board or interface.
However, for those who have already moved on, there are a healthy six PCIe
slots on offer, and this system would normally arrive with three still
available. The other three were already in use on the review model for the
NVIDIA 512MB GeForce G210 fanless graphics card, and two more expansion
cards providing twin Firewire and twin USB 3 ports (to supplement those
already on the
motherboard) respectively. Overall, there are plenty of ports
available: I counted a total of eight USB2 and four USB3 ports across the
top and rear panels, as well as the two Firewire ports on the expansion
card.
On the drive side, the case houses two of the ever-popular Western Digital
Caviar Black drives of 1TB capacity each, along with a single Corsair Force
3 series 240GB Solid State Drive that, with the motherboard's SATA 3 6Gb/s
interface, allows read/write rates of up to 550MB/s and incorporates the
well-respected SandForce controller, which uses a proprietary compression
system to minimise the amount of data actually written, which in turn
increases its speed and lifetime. In other words, it should speed up your
boot time and Windows performance without compromising long-term
reliability. Finally, talking of Windows, this machine had Windows
7 Pro 64-bit installed to take advantage of all that RAM.
General Performance
This overclocked 3930K processor turns in an excellent performance,
outperforming a similarly overclocked 2600k Sandy Bridge processor by around
18 percent, and with a huge 34GB/second memory bandwidth for those who run
vast sample-based orchestras.
As always, switch-on time is the moment of truth for any audio PC, and this
one didn't disappoint. Noise levels at the front were extremely low, and
what noise remained was mostly at top back where the main case fan exhausts.
When the case is mounted in a typical 'under the desk' scenario, it should
be very quiet indeed. Thanks to the Corsair 240GB Solid State Drive, it only
took about 12 seconds from the 'Starting Windows' message to reach the
desktop.
As expected, the drive turned in a jaw-dropping performance, with an average
transfer rate of 393 MB/second. When compared with the
254 MB/second of the same SSD in Inta Audio's i7 Ultimate Audio PC, reviewed
in SOS March 2012, this rather proves the effectiveness of the Asus SSD
caching on this motherboard.
Idling temperature was a comfortable 41 degrees Celsius, and none of the six
cores rose beyond a somewhat high but quite safe 72 degrees during my
torture tests, accompanied by a slight increase in acoustic noise that fell
within a few seconds of this 100 percent load being removed. On the software
side, Windows 7 Pro only needs a few tweaks for optimum audio performance:
Scan have set up a custom power setting profile, disabled Windows sound
mapping and allowed Windows Update to check for new updates, which the user
decides whether to download.
The Sisoftware Memory Bandwidth test measured 34GB/second, a huge increase
over any system I've reviewed to date, even compared with the 21GB/second of
the overclocked Sandy Bridge quad-core 2600K system I reviewed in June 2011,
proving the effectiveness of the
X79 quad-channel RAM architecture. Meanwhile, the CPU Arithmetic score was
176GIPS Dhrystone (an increase of around 30 percent over the aforementioned
2600K), the Integer CPU Multimedia was 388Mpixel/s (50 percent higher than
the 2600K), and the CPU Multimedia Float performance was an excellent
545Mpixel/s (almost
80 percent higher than the 2600K), all auguring very well for the audio
performance tests.
Audio Performance
Once I'd fired up the trusty DAWbench test inside Cubase, I soon found that
it wasn't torturous enough. Using a conservative 256-sample buffer setting
with the supplied RME HDSPe AIO audio interface, I didn't get any glitching,
even when running the maximum 320 instances of the Reaxcomp multiband
compressor plug-ins! I am therefore indebted to Vin Curigliano (the creator
of
DAWbench) for supplying an extended version of his utility capable of even
more punishing plug-in counts, which finally enabled me to run a massive 356
plug-ins at the 256 buffer setting, 322 with a
128 buffer size, 320 with a 64 size and 310 with a 32 size. This pushes the
Scan 3930K to the top of my chart with a 17-18 percent lead over a similarly
overclocked 2600K quad-core model. To put it another way, a 2600K would need
to run at a totally unachievable 5.3GHz to match it.
Final Thoughts
Some musicians may still be waiting for the incremental improvements of the
new quad-core Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs, but although I've yet to personally
test any of the newer versions of these, mainstream benchmarks suggest
results reasonably close to Sandy Bridge models at similar clock speeds.
More importantly, no hex-core Ivy Bridge options are so far available, so
Ivy Bridge simply isn't an option if you need the level of performance
achieved by this Scan 3930K hex-core review machine. It obviously won't be
the best choice if you're on a strict budget, and, as always, this is just
one snapshot from the Scan 3XS range, which offers plenty of tailored
options.
The bottom line is this: the six cores of the Scan 3XS Intel SAX6 PowerDAW
PC offer a lot more processing grunt than a quad-core 2600K-based machine
and up to 64GB of RAM for sampling duties, yet remains significantly cheaper
than a dual-CPU Xeon-based system. If
that's a compromise, it sounds like a good one to me! 903106
Alternatives
If you want more processing power than the musician's favourite 2600K can
provide, various specialist builders have systems that might suit. For
instance Inta Audio (www.inta-audio.com) offer their Ultimate Music PC with
a similar spec to this review system, as do Rain Recording
(www.raincomputers.co.uk) with their Element Pro X79, and Music PC
(www.music-pc.com) with their Vortex Ultimate range. If you need even more
processing grunt, Direct Resolution
(www.directresolutions.co.uk) have more powerful dual Xeon quad-cores in
their DARC Ultimate range, while Scan themselves have the 3XS Xeon 55
PowerDAW range.
Brief Specifications
Case: Fractal Design Define XL Case fitted with 625-watt Enermax
MODU82+ PSU.
Motherboard: Asus V-Pro P9X79, featuring Intel X79 chip set, one LGA 2011
Socket for second generation Intel Core i7 series processors, two banks of
four DDR3 DIMM sockets supporting up to 64GB of 2400MHz system memory, three
PCIe 3.0 compatible x16 (3 x PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16), one PCIe 3.0/2.0 x16 (x8
mode) and two PCIe 2.0
x1 expansion slots, two SATA 6GB/s connectors, four SATA 3GB/s connectors,
four USB 3 ports and up to 12 USB 2 ports.
Processor: Intel Core i7 3930K overclocked to 4.42GHz.
Cooling: Thermalright Archon air cooler with low-speed 140mm fan.
System RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance Gold 1600MHz CL9 DDR3 Quad Memory.
Hard Drive: two Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB drives, one
Corsair Force 3 series 240GB SSD drive.
Graphics Card: NVIDIA EVGA 512MB GeForce G210, equipped with one D-Sub, one
Dual Link DVI-I and one HDMI port, and passive (heat
sink) cooling.
Fitted Expansion Cards: two-port Firewire 1394a LoPro PCI-E, two-port
Silverstone EC01 Int USB3 PCI-E.
Optical Drive: Samsung 22x DVD-RW Writer.
Installed Operating System: Windows 7 Pro 64-bit.
Scan 3XS Support
Each Scan 3XS system is built in-house to order, with a 24-hour burn-in
period and various quality-control checks. A hidden partition holding a
complete system image is also created, so you can return to the factory
default if you need to. The standard warranty lasts 12 months, and there are
options to extend this to two or three years. Technical support is handled
in-house by a dedicated team available on the telephone and online.
Published in SOS August 2012
--------------------------------------------------
CTS MASTERING: http://www.ctsmastering.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/CTSMASTERING
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/CTS-Mastering/139114066128698
Linked In: http://ca.linkedin.com/pub/chris-smart/46/824/536
Dropbox: Have your stuff when you need it. 2GB is free:
http://db.tt/bQ2GuIt
PLEASE READ THIS FOOTER AT LEAST ONCE!
To leave the list, click on the immediately following link:
ddots-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe
If this link doesn't work then send a message to:
ddots-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
and in the Subject line type
unsubscribe
For other list commands such as vacation mode, click on the immediately
following link:
ddots-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=faq or send a message, to
ddots-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx and in the Subject line type faq
PLEASE READ THIS FOOTER AT LEAST ONCE!
To leave the list, click on the immediately following link:
ddots-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe
If this link doesn't work then send a message to:
ddots-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
and in the Subject line type
unsubscribe
For other list commands such as vacation mode,
click on the immediately following link:
ddots-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=faq or
send a message, to
ddots-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
and in the Subject line type
faq
Other related posts:
