Intel i7 5960 / x99

Has anyone taken the Intel i7 5960 / x99 plunge for their Cubase rigs?

Untested CPU. That would be tantamount to masochism… :laughing:

plenty of info on gearslutz
not enough traffic in this forum to bother

that will you get started…

very wonky platform , what memory is extremely important

just got mine, doing installs now. should be operational Friday. Will report next week.

Look forward to your results… Mine have been very good. I am extremely pleased.

up and running. Seems much more powerful but i have not pushed it just yet. The load times did not change though. I have a internal raid 10 on 4 drives for my samples and the kontakt instruments I load locally take just as long to load. The session loading issues with VEP are the same as well, not even a little faster than my 4770K that was at 4.2GHz. This is the 5960X at 4.4GHz. very stable. somethings like menus are a little snappier but I was hoping the VEP issues I have had after moving to 7.5 would have been improved. 23 instances with 4 midi ports each still takes about 63 second to load… was hoping for something like 35 seconds but no change with that. otherwise so far so good. Seems like my ram load time is the new bottleneck. DDR4 in the new box but did not go with the fastest I could find to keep some heat off the cpu. not sure it was the right choice right now.

was considering a ZFS server for the studio with 10Gb ethernet connections so it would look like volumes on all our rigs here (3) keeping all our samples, video, music library in one faster than 6GB place, but seemingly not going to be able to take advantage of 10gbaseT until ram load times speeds up…

My 5960x build really delivers on CPU bound operations rather than I/O. If your experience is similar to mine you will notice a big improvement in plugin counts. Please let us know.

Are you using HDDs?

Going for non-RAID SSDs will about halve your load times. RAID may only marginally improve that, if at all. An SSD can be transferring 15 seconds of 44.1k samples/audio in the average time it takes a HDD to move its heads.

Also, you will get a 30-50% real transfer rate improvement by formatting sample and project drives with 64kB sectors, as opposed to the default Windows 4kB sectors, which require 16 times the OS IO-servicing overhead.

This Anyone using SSDs in RAID 0? thread on the SoundsOnline forums has a lot of discussion and some measurements relevant to this thread.

I think such centralisation/virtualisation of resources will really take off once AoIP (Audio over IP) and PCoIP (video/USB over IP) mature with enough support. Then you would see studios being run off something like a Cisco UCS with TBs of RAM, multiple quad CPU modules, 40-100Gbps backbone, feeding PCoIP and AoIP into control rooms, and AoIP into a PoE hub feeding AoIP and power to audio interfaces at each performer taking in recording signals and providing foldback. And everywhere, bar the UCS storage room, running completely silent!

Tonight I’ll start assembling my new system. Asus X99 Deluxe motherboard, i7-5960X, Corsair Vegeance LPX 32 GB DDR4. I am considering using the HYPER M.2 x 4 in one of my pci express ports, driving 2 SSD M2. discs.

Is there a tangible reason to pay extra for Deluxe version of motherboard ?

Richer OC features like 5-way optimization, built in wifi and audio (I know, audio is useless in this case) and native PCIe M.2 x4 SSD support

Can anyone comment on the stability and overall impressions on their I7-5960x builds?

All is well here. No stability issues.

WiFi is typically causes latency problems on DAWs. I would suggest using a wired connection to a WiFi bridge if you must use WiFi, and totally disabling onboard WiFi.


I would be interested in whether there are actually performance benefits for DAW/samplers in using such faster storage.

The issues are that DAW/sampler:
a) Low latency requirements may prevent fully utilising the maximum SSD bandwidths.
b) CPU usage profiles may not allow data to get to sustained levels that can fully utilise storage bandwidth.
c) Storage accessing profiles may not facilitate sustained data rates.

At the moment, I tend to think that using standard non-RAIDed SSDs pretty well takes storage off the critical path as far as DAW/sampler performance is concerned, judging by how little time difference there is between loading samples from SSDs and from disk cache, leaving CPUs as the bottleneck.

However, if DAW/sampler software gets significantly better at using CPUs, and CPUs themselves take a quantum leap up in performance, then faster storage is definitely a go.

No issues with the wifi stack here… Latencies are low, track/plugin counts are very high and loads are well-distributed amongst the 16 threads. In terms of SSD, I think we will see an ongoing march towards RAM speed. At some point persisted storage will read and write n bytes (whether that’s 1 byte/1k byte/whatever) in a couple of clock ticks. Now, whether i/o will be tethered to a thread and whether thread-based async i/o will be supported is another question - probably yes.

When primary and secondary memory merge like that, all programs and OSs would require rewriting, as they:
a) Use different sets of instructions for memory and I/O, the latter then being redundant for 99% of the storage ops.
b) Could be installed and permanently ready to run, which would require redesigning their architectures.

The future was really shown when storage started being available in modules that could be inserted into memory slots, though they are a 1000x too slow at this time.

Yes on all counts…

In a week or two I receive my Corsair Vegeance 2400MHz LPX 64GB DDR4 RAM and will replace the 32GB that I have. Then I’ve maxed out all there is.

For me what matters most are the extra fan connectors. All fan connectors (11) are occupied. Lots of fan running at low and quiet speeds moving loads of air.

Are the i7-5960x users still happy with their setup?
I’m considering the i7-5960x for my new build, still have doubts if it’s worth the price.

Any thoughts?

Justus