I've been in the planning stages of building a new 64 bit SAC/SAW machine now for several months. It has been laboriously coming together in fits and starts and I finally have some results to report. The short of it is - THIS REALLY WORKS! It has exceeded my expectations so far and I have not found it's ceiling yet. I am so pleased to be able to say that.
I built a new machine and bought new equipment to use with it so long as I was moving to 64 bit. For some years I've been using an i7-based PC with a Fireface 800, Windows XP and, of course, SAC/SAW 32. The combo has been problematic from the very beginning. I've used it a lot anyway but there have been many points along the way that I really wanted to ditch it. Or, maybe kick it - then ditch it! I haven't had those problems with my new rig and I have pushed it much further and harder than the old one.
It mostly runs great although I still have one intermittent issue involving a conflict between SAW and my mouse that I need to resolve. In some situations, while doing heavy tracking, when I try to move my mouse it's being delayed so that nothing happens - and then the pointer apparently teleports to the other end of the screen. I can resolve it by plugging a different mouse into a different USB 2 at the same time. Somehow that causes the original to move over to use the other, non-offending, stream. Thereafter, I can even unplug the second mouse and the first still works correctly. I need a better solution than this, of course, but for now it's just a minor annoyance.
The new hardware:
Converters and preamps:RME Fireface UFX+
Grace Design m108
Startech Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt adapter (TBT3TBTADAP)
Motherboard:Gigabyte Z390 Designare
Processor:Intel i5-8500 with stock cooler but Arctic Silver 5 processor grease
RAM:32 GB - Corsair Vengeance LPX, 2x16, DDR4 2666 MHz
Storage:Samsung 970 EVO Plus - 512 GB
OS:Windows 10 LTSC
Thank-you to all those who have given me advice, whether I took it or not.
As this is a test build, I mounted it all in an old case I had which already had a DVD drive (handy for installing from the MB disk) and a power supply. I'm not overclocking. The i5-8500 runs stock at 3GHz.
I chose the MB because it had Thunderbolt soldered into it - and secondarily because I like Gigabyte MBs. It may be that those MBs making use of other TB-access techniques will work just as well - but this seemed most likely not to have problems to me, so I went with it. I didn't want a 'oh - you got the kind with the exposed wire...' sort of problem.
After setting up the RME stuff and plugging the UFX+ into the computer via Thunderbolt, and hanging the m108 off the UFX+ via ADAT, and setting up SAC and SAW - I started testing. I've done larger and larger tests over the past few days using successively smaller buffers - currently at 1-64 and 48k/24. Except for the mouse issue I haven't really had a problem. I haven't limited the number of cores nor given it instructions as to how to prioritize itself.
My most recent test suite is 2 mics from the m108 providing input to 28 stereo input channels in SAC (thanks Uptildawn!). All of those channels have individual copies of FreeverbToo (thanks Dell!) running on them (so - 28 copies...). FOH is using up 4 output channels. In addition, I have 2 more monitor mixes using 1 stereo track each and each headed out to 2 outs (total of 8...). The 28 stereo inputs are being picked up by SAW, where they're being recorded to 28 stereo tracks. I've done test runs as long as 3 hours and 15 minutes. I've ganged-up all 28 SAC channels and then played Tarzan with the SAC controls - hopefully exercising them sufficiently - until I got bored doing it. That's been the big issue with testing so far - utter boredom. And you want that. So far that seems rock solid at about 20% processor usage.
I figure this is equivalent to 60 mono signals running 28 VST effects plus 8 output channels while recording 56 mono signals. It's more than I'll ever use - or even have input equipment to provide. Down the road I want to re-purpose my Fireface 800 to become 8 more channels in, 4 more preamps, and 8 more out. That brings the total to 28 in and sort of explains why I doubled that to 28 stereo (to be sure...).
I'm plenty pleased enough at 1-64, but I'm hoping it will work as well at 1-32. And I still haven't tried it with a VSTi. I ran latency monitor (thanks Warren!). It didn't give me the dropped buffers report I was looking for, but it did give me the '...suitable for tracking...' message. I should probably keep investigating that. And - I still have that mouse issue to resolve. It may be that project lasso (thanks Philip!) will resolve that (or maybe I can just change which port I plug the mouse receiver into). I need to rebuild that machine in a rack case (and buy the case...) and move it and the rest of the stuff to mobile racks. Plus there's still lots of testing to do. But otherwise this is really coming along.
So well, in fact, that I'm going to buy some new monitors for my home studio. There's no place close that I can listen to good ones so I'm going to do a shoot-out here with 3 that I'm interested in that I'm shipping in: Focal sm9, Adam s3h, and Genelec 8341a (sometimes known as 8341 SAM) while the end-of-fiscal-year sales are still going on. I plan to return 2 sets. The timing isn't good but the sales discount is a powerful motivator.
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