Hi Peter,

I'm still withstanding to change from W8 to W7 though I had some days of doubt    I feeel that a delicate balance between CPU speed, SFS and buffer settings is necessary. If that's the case the tuning of the "Qs" is promising. Actually 375 MHz are set for the CPU, SFS=40 and buffer size = 512 byte. That's the maximum for the 4 kernels. I tinker with the idea to switch to 8 kernels (AMD). Are this kernels supported by XXHighend in a similar way as the Intel kernels?

Georg   

Hi Peter,

I unplugged the silverstone card from the mobo and measured bracket vs. molex ground and pci ground - it's connected. I removed the bracket from the silverstone and hopefully will hear no placebos 

Georg

Hi Peter,

following your thoughts about the interesting area of settings for Q1 Q1x and Buffersize I decided to use a dice to determine useful settings 
There came out Q1XQ1x = 9, Buffer=4096 and SFS=120.

Muscic flow and swing are here again 

Georg

P.S.: Will try other settings furthermore ...

I ordered the Silverstone card too. To ensure that the most recent software is used I tried to download the Windows driver and the actual firmware. But there is a wrong download link for the firmware file.
The  correct address is http://www.silverstonetek.com/downloads/Driver/EC04-P_uDP720201_FW2020.rar
Playing music with the card after 24 hours burn in I must say that there is improvement - but only when connecting the 5V molex to a separate linear power supply!

Georg

It's possible in my Mobo BIOS to set a basic clock reference (150 MHz for example) and define for every core a multiple of that clock. I dont't know if there is a trick for the Intel CPU in your BIOS.  Here I am at one's wits' end ...

Georg

Hi Juan,

I always found that lowering the power consumption or CPU frequencies helps a lot - the noise level is reduced. It's a combination of measures and mostly empirical  ...

Georg

 Hi Juan,

there must be an overclocking section in the mobo bios - you can use it for underclocking too. But it's necessary to address the CPU clock directly. In some BIOS versions you can change the DRAM speed and CPU clocking is changed accordingly, but that's untransparent. I'm using a 4 core AMD cpu and the bios has got a very detailed overclocking section. I don't know how to do it with Intel based boards but I remember that there was a thread about that in the forum.

Georg 

P.S.: Before experimenting save your actual BIOS settings on disk or write them down. In some cases the whole system cannot startup again because of wrong settings. It's possible to reset the BIOS setting via jumper on the mobo. You have to disassemble the PC partly to reach that location. So you have to exercise patience 

By the way - I removed every mod from the amp and the speakers today. They are not necessary anymore. Additionally I found a bad soldering which was crucial for sometimes changig SQ. Hopefully that's all for now 

Georg

Found the best ever SQ here with this sweetspot:

- Peters settings but
- ClockRes = 0.5ms
- ThreadPrio = BelowNormal

Everything fits into place and is consistent - fantastic! But I cannot judge the low octaves ...

Georg

My first impressions:

It needs time to change the listening habit. There is a really big difference.

The soundstage is centered (it has been a bit out of alignment to the left side with my system).

The SQ is more analog than ever.

It seems that really fast equipment following the DAC is necessary to get the full impression!

I'm playing with 4 cores@450MHz - but it seems that there is headroom left.

Below the line: You did it again, Peter 

Georg

Happy new year and open minds and ears for 2014 

Georg

Hi Peter,

I'm using a tv display and had only one time the problem of strange colors. But once in a while the different display areas are shifted / reduced / overlayed. It's ok again after logging out / logging in.

Georg

Peter,

I have to increase processor clock to 1.1 GHz - so hopefully I do not compare apple and oranges. First impressions with the system here:

- Music is quieter with the same XXHE volume position
- The first 5 minutes of the listening I was missing dynamics
- After 20 minutes of listening  - the stage is backwards greater, instruments are moving backwards too and sounding a bit quieter, what should be the right thing.
- There is additional "space" between "sound fragments" - if listening to a tabla I can better distinguish between the fingers drumming or the swing out of sitar tones is clearly heard even when new strings are plucked.
- All with naturalness and without superficiality

Georg

I'd like to share some hopefully interesting tweaks:

I have switched on HPET timer in BIOS a long time ago. Yesterday I read in different forums that W7 or W8 have not switched on HPET timer support normally.

- Open command window
- Enter "bcdedit /set useplatformclock yes"
- Reboot

(Use "no" if you like to switch back)

Additionally W8 allows to switch to a common hardware tick. Microsoft wrotes "Forces the clock to be backed by a platform source, no synthetic timers are allowed".

- Open command window
- Enter "bcdedit /set useplatformtick yes"
- Reboot

(Use "no" if you like to switch back)

I'm courious about your feedback 

Georg

Hi Peter,

undoubtedly there is an immediate influence on bass reproduction without negative influence to allover SQ. Especially interesting is the Q1 and Q1x combination, which I never tried. Can't give a really good input for low bass SQ because my environment is restricted. 

Georg