Mani,

For the amount of effort involved it might be fun to try Hyerthreading. I have not had much experience but I used it a few years ago on a single core CPU I had. It worked very well and made a difference to music back then. Reading the IntFilter doc the system seems to support Hyperthreaded CPUs

You could have system stuff on one or two CPUs then XXHighEnd, and your playback drivers on separate CPUs with the rest of them. Not sure how it would sound but its nice to find a use for EIGHT! cpus 

Nick.

As promised this is the full list of IntFilters that I am running on my thin Vista Build. I have added more elements to the CPU 0 list after today’s power cut in my village and the sound has improved by a large step again !

As you will see a great deal of stuff is on CPU0 and has to "get by" on just a 3GHz processor  (on my machine) poor processes

If you want to try the settings add them say 10 at a time and reboot so that you can fault find if they do not work for you machine. They are not a random selection though so they should be reasonably close straight off I hope.

Nick.

The information is attached in both Word and Excel formats

Bolero,

Glad you like it, thanks for the confirmation.

Best,

Nick

Mani,

Great result !
By the way. I think I should have said use highend CPU appointment scheme 3 not 2 as above (if I remember rightly 2 uses cores 0 and 1 which will conflict with the system irqs set). Give appointment 3 a go. I think this will improve results a lot.

Regards,
Nick

Mani,

The list will vary a not from system to system but just shunt stuff to CPU 0. That you think is not involved in music replay. I'm a bit limited right now as I'm on a smart phone but I will try to do a recipe post this evening. Yesterday I moved about 75% of stuff to CPU 0 and this morning.g after thinking some stuff through got much more adventuros as I was rebooting the power went off !

Stay with it, you will not believe the difference,

Marcin hi,

You can still do this with 2 cpus. Shut system background irqs to CPU 0 and set processor scheduling to scheme 2 in highend. The I would use either 0 and 1 for sound card or just 1, depending on which sounds best. This WILL work I'm prity sure from process affinity setting iv used in the past. 

Cheers,
Nick

Marcin, Roy, Main,

This is DEFIANTLY one to try as soon as you can. Sorry, I just want to make sure its on your radars. I will not say anything much about the sound except it changes the PC as a platform for music.

Nick.

Ps
I'm really frustrated, I am off today and the local power company has cut power to the house for maintenance won't be back on till 5pm !

Peter,

I would happily wait for z09-3 with irq affinity in it. Manually configured the sound is like nothing I have heard from digital.

I think there is a fair amount of testing to get the best from this. The allocation I tried is one I came up with to try to match HighEnds current processor appointment scheme, over night the are more I want  to try out. An internal approach could maybe do much  more.

I had looked at ways of doing irq allocation a long time ago but just gave up. Your comment relit the thought that there was is an easy way to do it and this time was the lucky one. The power of a forum is great.

Would love to have you thoughts on sound.

Best
Nick

Trust your ears Nick....Oh boy... Right here we go !

I have been looking at ways to set affinity of drivers after something the Peter said in a post. The basic theory is that if you can arrange the systems IRQ handeling work load across processors then you can give XXHighend and your sound device driver a BIG slice of uninterrupted system resources to be super responsive and make great music.

For about a year I have been playing with 2 CPUs out of 4 because as I add in the extra CPUs sound deteriorates badly. I’m listening now with 4CPUs to sound I find the sound hard to distinguish from a record player. My wife has the most sensertive ears of anyone I know (she can still easily hear bats), the slightest digital distortion makes her literally run from the room. She has just given a big thumbs up to the sound which is a first in years..HOW ?

All of the none music related IRQs on my system are being serviced on CPU 0 alone. CPU 2 is now used for HighEnd Engine 3 and my USB (I use a USB SPDIF interface), RamDisk and Hiface Drivers IRQ requests are running on CPUs 1,2 and 3 (unfortunatly thats all the CPUs I have right now ). 3 / 4 of the CPUs are now running only Music related IRQ requests.

The recipe for this setup is a program called IntFiltr which is a .sys driver that allows you to assign IRQs to CPUs. It is not intended for Vista but seems to work fine on my system. You can get the software at this location and installation instruction are also there. Just remember to run the configuretor as Administrator.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/252867

How to assign IRQs for XXHighEnd Music replay (tested on Vista)

1)   Install the package
2)   Enable all the CPUs you have on your system using normal config options.
3)   Reboot
4)   Set you XXHighEnd to run CPU appointment scheme 2 (Engine3.exe then runs on CPU 1)
5)   Run the IntFiltr configuration application
6)   In IntFilter select one by one each devices in the list [with the exception any devices related to CPU, Disk, PCI bus and your music devices (music devices include USB and Firewire devices if this are used to play)] and click “Add Filter” for the selected device. Then using the “Set Mask” button set the affinity for these devices to CPU 0.
7)   Leave your Disk, CPU and PCI devices and anything else you think should not be touched as they are (don’t create Filters for these).
   Now find you connection devices (USB / Firewire) and your sound card and “Add Filter” Filter for each of these. For these use “Set Mask” to use CPUs 1,2,3,,,[Max CPU no].

Notes.
If any of sound replay devices (USB, Firewire, sound card) share IRQs make sure you apply the CPUs 1,2,3,,,[Max CPU no] to the other devices that share the IRQs


That’s it reboot make a cup of tea (well i am  from the UK) and sit back and listen. 


Nick.

Marcin

I over clock my gpu on the basis that it might be a bit quicker at dealing with graphics calls when music is  playing. To be honest though I have not managed to detect an A/B improvement so in my system the setting is more theory.

Just a thought are you running an OS swop file ? It has high i/o priority and its not really needed for music.

Regards
Nick.

Peter hi,

We have our wires crossed a little, but we are both actually on the on the same page I think. I am defiantly not suggesting that people use autoruns to batch automatically settings onto their machines.

I also use Autoruns the same way you describe which is to remove stuff that doesn’t help music.

My reason for posting my .arn file us that this gives precise details of what a thin build can run without and sound ok. What I think folks might do is to manually transfer the settings that they want to try between two copies of autoruns running on their machine. One copy open with their machine autoruns displayed to be edited and the other copy looking at my .arn file. This should only be done with some thought to what is happening and on a boot that is experimental and therefore it doesn’t matter too much if things don't go well. I have done this process in the last couple of days to rebuild my thin Vista after the AHCI problem and its not too difficult to do and since I was not bothered about losing the Vista boot it took 30 mins to transfer all the settings over.

Autoruns frustration.....

I have spent the morning trying to get to the bottom of why Marcin is getting Chinese characters when he opens my .arn file. It appears the current autoruns version 10.3 is not compatible with my file which was created in v9.35 ! I tried installing 10.3 on my machine to read the .arn I posted but I got Chinese characters as well. Then I tried to generate a new .arn file with version 10.3 and hit a known bug with Autoruns which is that this version will sometimes not display all of the intended categories correctly (only about 15% are listed). I therefore cannot create an .arn file with a complete list of what is no my PC using the current version 10.3. @**$£!!!!!

Possible solution.....

The only option I can think of is to post my .ARN file and the version of autoruns needed to view it v9.35 with so folks have the same software. Do the forum rules allow me to post an executable? I think the licence is a freely distributable one.
Out of interest can you Autoruns version read the .arn I posted ?

Nick.

Marcin,
Chinese  I did not expect that. I think that it is possible that your autoruns install has in the wrong language. How do the settings of you pc display when you just load autoruns? are that ok.

I will take a look at the file too to see if any thing has gone wrong looks like a character set problem.


Peter,
Just so I know where to start with notes have you installed the autoruns program from the link I posted. You proberbly already use the program maybe ?

Nick

I should have atteched a link to the Autoruns program in case you don't have it.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963902.aspx

Nick

I have attached the Autoruns for my thin Vista build.

These are for EXPERIMENTATION only at the moment. They are not supposed to be applied verbatim to systems.
PLEASE BE VERY CAREFUL changing system config with Autoruns it can make your system unbootable very easily. Trust me I'v had a lot of forced rebuilds getting here. The settings are are specific to my system (eg my drivers and hardware) but the general config items should work on most Vista builds.

The best way to proceed is to;
1)   Open you systems Autoruns in one window.
2)   Open the attached Autoruns in another window.
3)   Position the windows on screen so you can see them both.
4)   Transfer the setting of my Autoruns to yours in blocks of about 10 at a time. AVOID changing anything that looks like it is a hardware driver specific to your system (sound cards etc).
5)   Reboot and see if the last block of changes works, it’s worth playing music each time as some can stop HighEnd working (see recovering if you cannot boot)
6)   If you cannot boot you need to press F8 after the BIOS posts to get to the safe boot screen. When you are in the F8 screen USE LAST KNOWN GOOD CONFIGURATION. This will normally get you going again.

Note that there are no WinSock entries in my safeboots. This is only because you cannot toggle on and off, you have to delete them one by one. It is fine to do this and well worth while (no network on your dedicated music OS!)

There are endless permutations and it’s taken months / years to get this listing and its defiantly possible to go further. If you do go further than these settings you do need to A/B test changes you can easily end up harming sound (sometimes is a subtle way like slight loss of a little dynamics or timber).

Have fun.

Nick.

Thats great Roy 

Peter,

I just remembered, don't know if this will help you but the distorsion onset was be linked to the display on my old PC. The distorsion would oftern be accompanied by horizontal static on screen starting exactly when the sound changed. I remember looking at drivers, IRQ etc etc but no luck for me. Just in case it points you in a good direction.

Regards,

Nick.