Built new PC (AMD), fantastic performance with HW5!

My ancient PC's long anticipated expiration finally incentivized me to build out my dream rig. HW5 was a major driver of my technical specs, as I wanted large memory capacity for those new sample sets (128GB capable, 64GB initially deployed), and lots of reasonably fast cores. Video editing was my other driver, which wants really fast cores and a capable graphics co-processor.

My initial bias was for an Intel i9-9900K chip, but in December the reviews for the new AMD Ryzen 9-3900x convinced me to switch from 20 years of Intel loyalty. The Ryzen was benchmarking within a gnat's-breadth of the single-core performance of the Intel, while having 50% more cores - 12 physical / 24 virtual on the Ryzen, versus 8p/16v for the Intel. The Ryzen also comes with a very capable stock air-cooler, while you have to buy an after-market cooler for the Intel CPU. I selected a mid-level gamer's X570 motherboard, which supports the very new PCIe4 bus speeds (though all my present peripherals max at PCIe3 speeds.) I installed 2x32GB of DDR4-3200 CL16 memory, and a Samsung 970EVO 1TB M.2-NVME SSD as my OS / Software / HW5 cache-files drive. Other storage is a combo of SATA SSD and 2 HDDs I had around, all good performing devices, but nothing extraordinary. Everything is running stock speeds, no special overclocking. OS is Win10Pro, fully patched, with nothing turned-off or tweaked for HW5, and with a live wireless Internet connection. I brought up Task Manger to see how HW5 made use of the 24 cores, and left all the usual MS and supporting background stuff enabled (OneDrive, Defender, NVIDIA...), Firefox up and running with about 5 tabs open, but no other user applications of mine running. Audio out was a stereo DAC connected via USB2.0, using ASIO4ALL's driver.

For testing, I used the 4GB+ version of the Polyphony Testing Organ, set to 500 pipes per key.

Results, short form: Wow. Couldn't find a way to bring my steady-state CPU past 55%.

Longer form:
1) With HW5 running but no organ loaded, it took 9 seconds from initiating the organ load to having a "playable" keyboard.
2) Using 2 dowels, I was able to trigger all 61 keys on my driving keyboard, presumably 30,500 pipes polyphony. My processor initially spiked to 75% in Task Manager for a few seconds, then settled down to the mid-50s steady state. Hauptwerk's CPU bar-graph correlated well with the OS Task Manager display.
3) HW5 seemed to make great use of all 24 virtual cores; the graphs showed HW5 maintaining an excellent load-balance across all cores (I ran it for about 3 minutes.) The first 4 cores showed variances over the test period, ranging from 20-60% busy. The remaining 20 cores all looked alike holding a steady load at around 55%. Nice work, Martin! Really nice...
4) The CPU clock-speed settled in at a touch over 4GHz - 3.8GHz is the base clock, but bursts up to 4.6GHz are possible. No thermal throttling apparent after 3 minutes of operation.
5) Free memory was around 51GB.

I'm extremely happy with these results - now I can unleash a few of those sample sets that I had to whittle down to fit at all in my legacy PC.

Aside - I bought all my components from Amazon & NewEgg, choice based on lowest price while in-stock. All parts were ordered on a Thursday evening, all components where in my possession by Saturday morning. While building the machine, I found a minor physical problem on the motherboard. Next morning I logged on to Amazon requesting a replacement, within one minute had the transaction completed, and received my replacement board the next morning. Very pleasing, that!

[mdyde]

Thanks, Bob.

Glad to hear it all performs so well.

3) HW5 seemed to make great use of all 24 virtual cores; the graphs showed HW5 maintaining an excellent load-balance across all cores (I ran it for about 3 minutes.) The first 4 cores showed variances over the test period, ranging from 20-60% busy. The remaining 20 cores all looked alike holding a steady load at around 55%

On a computer with plenty of cores, Hauptwerk v5 keeps the first four virtual cores for the virtual organ relay/MIDI, background models, etc., and spreads the load evenly across the remaining cores for voice generators (polyphony) and convolution reverb (if applied).

1) With HW5 running but no organ loaded, it took 9 seconds from initiating the organ load to having a "playable" keyboard.

In case it's relevant and you aren't already aware of it, on the 'General settings | General preferences | Advanced ...' screen tab you could also try reducing the 'Extra time to allow when starting audio on Windows if not running at real-time priority (secs)' setting (or setting it to 0). (That setting is there to try to suppress any audio glitches that sometimes happen on PCs as Windows moves threads around amongst CPU cores initially after starting audio.)

Martin, I appreciate the design insight, and thanks most kindly for a wonderful piece of software, both technically and musically - I'm a computer scientist/technologist by trade, and highly value artistry & craftsmanship in our profession. And you, sir, have demonstrated both in abundance. Since the late sixties, I've applied and used in my "real life" our developing tech, and I say unequivocally that HW has provided me the single greatest amount of pleasure of any piece of software I've directly interacted with. Thank you.

Regarding the 9-seconds load/start-up for the 4GB Polyphony Tester, no concerns implied there at all - that is substantially faster than with any predecessor PC I've used, and all organs load very crisply for their sizes on this config. A small instrument, say the Sonus Paradisi Klavichord, becomes playable in 2+ seconds from clicking "load organ". I'm happy! I chose the PolyTester as it seems to be the "largest" of the instruments everyone will have out-of-the-box. Of the 9 seconds, roughly 8 appear to simply be the mechanics of getting the sample's bits into memory. I run HW5 with admin privs (assigned them to the desktop start-up icon), and HW5 is successfully altering its scheduling priority to real-time and by-passing the extra MIDI init delay, as advertised. I also keep that initialization delay parameter set low within the HW5 configuration- I've never had a failure in HW5 while set at 1 second and HW5 not at real-time priority, on any of several machines.

With this new PC config, the only delay I've ever experienced, and I've not been able to reliably reproduce it, is occasional excessive time taken unloading an organ - once when explicitly unloading an organ from the menu, and once during the implicit unload when loading another. Both times HW5 went totally non-responsive (and Windows marked it as such on HW5's title bar), even the progress bars froze, for 30-90 seconds, before continuing successfully. I suspect this may relate to memory management whilst freeing up memory. I now have both both copious physical memory (64GB) and large virtual memory usage that I never before had, 12GB physical being the largest I've previously experienced with HW5. I'm running stock Win10-Pro out of the box, freshly installed, fully patched, and with page file management deferred to the OS and situated on my boot SSD.

[mdyde]

Thanks again, Bob.

With this new PC config, the only delay I've ever experienced, and I've not been able to reliably reproduce it, is occasional excessive time taken unloading an organ - once when explicitly unloading an organ from the menu, and once during the implicit unload when loading another. Both times HW5 went totally non-responsive (and Windows marked it as such on HW5's title bar), even the progress bars froze, for 30-90 seconds, before continuing successfully. I suspect this may relate to memory management whilst freeing up memory. I now have both both copious physical memory (64GB) and large virtual memory usage that I never before had, 12GB physical being the largest I've previously experienced with HW5. I'm running stock Win10-Pro out of the box, freshly installed, fully patched, and with page file management deferred to the OS and situated on my boot SSD.

Current/recent Windows 10 versions are extremely slow at releasing locked memory (which is a performance bug that Microsoft are aware of and do plan to fix again at some point). As a work-around, if you disable the Windows page file completely then Hauptwerk doesn't need to lock data into memory (since paging couldn't occur anyway), and you'll find organs unload *much* faster. (Windows 7, older Windows 10 versions, and macOS are all fast at releasing locked memory anyway.)