Hi everyone

This is my first post here, I've just joined up and need the advice of some like minded people regarding a new PC build I'm currently planning. As the title suggests, I've got some specific questions, so I'll just jump right in...

- If you are using an Intel Haswell CPU, have you experienced any DPC latency issues and to what degree?
- If you have, did you find a fix yet? If so, was it straight forward or a matter of tweaking a combination of tiny factors until you got lucky?

Haswell chips are:
i3 4130 / 4330 / 4340
i5 4430 / 4440 / 4570 / 4670
i7 4770 / 4771

The reason I'm asking is because I'm currently planning a new PC build which would include the top end i7 4770K. But I've found various references online to DPC latency issues with the whole Haswell family. It's slightly confusing because most of what I can find are slightly dated articles and forum posts, nothing really very current and positive, or uniform. Some info I've found online seems to suggest it's just onboard audio that's affected, whilst other reports aren't clear. There's also factors like the OS being reported as a large contributing factor - W7 vs W8. It's also strange that while I've found these references to DPC issues, places like Scan are selling pro-audio machines which use Haswell CPUs.

So, before I go shelling out for this i7, I'm trying to gauge what the current state of play is with Haswell's DPC issues and if there are plenty of people actually using Haswell processors on their DAW PCs without any DPC problems at all. Are you one of them?


For the sake of clarity, here's the bulk of my spec at present:
Case: Nanoxia Deep Silence 1
Mobo: Asus Z87-A or an MSI Z87-G45
CPU: Intel i7 4770K
Cooler: Phanteks PH-TC14PE
RAM: Corsair XMS3 DDR3 Dual Channel 8GB or 16gb (likely 16gb)
SSD: Samsung Evo 840 120GB (for Windows 7 OS only, dual boot - one music, one everyday use)
PSU: Seasonic Fanless 520W Platinum SS-520FL2

Cheers
Mike

 

I have a Haswell laptop(Asus G750) and have had to make a couple of tweaks. Firstly, I use throttlestop to disable the power saving modes of the CPU when producing. This is because it clocks down to 0.8Ghz when under low CPU load, which happens on new projects with only a couple of synths. The audio was crackling until I did this.

I use Windows 8 and DPC latency checker doesn't work properly yet. But I did disable one of the power saving features of Windows 8 - disabledynamictick. If you google it you'll see what I mean.

The system is pretty solid, I'm happy with it so far. The highest DPC reported is from the Nvidia driver, not much I can do about that as far as I know.

 

DPC latency depends on the CPU the least, any CPU. However, regarding CPU, it depends on its powersaving features and all CPUs that have powersaving features work worse with them enabled. So no, I don't think there are any problems with Intel Haswell CPUs, or to put it another way - there are problems with all modern CPUs with throttling, speedstep, save this, save that, turbo this, turbo that etc. It ALL has to be OFF! Like C1E feature and all the shit you find in BIOS considering CPU powersaving. I'm right now actually assembling two Haswell PCs for some people... and they work great. One tip regarding motherboard - never buy the most expensive one with 1000 features, but rather buy a middle "class" one with the features that you find useful. The more features on the motherboard - the more chance of DPC latency issues. I usually buy Gigabyte UD4 or UD3 motherboards for my PCs.

Next, DPC latency depends mainly on the quality of: the motherboard BIOS, components, and drivers. OS can have an influence on DPC, too, because newer Windows all have too much bloat in them that has absolutely nothing to do with better, more efficient, faster or whatever audio and it doesn't help running your DAW more efficiently at all, on the contrary, additional layers of APIs and frameworks and whatnot that cuts the direct connection of drivers to hardware, which is beneficial for having less blue screens if some drivers are written badly, but it is not beneficial for the efficiency and DPC of the drivers.

But people feel stupid if they don't run the latest BS that Microsoft regurgitates at us no matter if it's worth it or not. All that matters is that it's the last, newest, brand new shit, right?

I'm still proudly running Windows XP, thank you. It flies and it's lightweight. Everything works nicely. If I needed 64bit OS, I would probably try XPx64 first and only then Windows 7x64. I find installing W7x86 a reasonably stupid idea, unless you really need W7 for some reason. Windows 8 will never see my studio, ever. I can guarantee you that. Unless by some miracle Microsoft slim it down to 1GB and make some really useful changes that benefit DAW users somehow. We'll have Reaper and VST natively in Linux by the time that I would even consider to install Windows 8 on my PC that will probably have some 10nm 32 core CPU at 16GHz, with 512GB of RAM and 512TB SSD.

 

On Haswell here. (hackintosh)

I7 4770K - CPU
GA-Z87X-UD3H - Motherboard
32 GB Crucial Ballistix - Ram
Gigabyte GTX760 - GPU
Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 - Interface -- I thought this was the culprit originally, and was about to take it back. I would have hated to do that... Although The Saffire Pro 40 being a firewire device would have probably been the better way to go. (for me, and I'll get to why in a moment)

OSX Mountain Lion 10.8.5


My Geekbench score: just shy of 18,000


In both Mavericks, 10.9 and 10.9.1, as well as my latest attempt with the latest Mountain Lion 10.8.5 from the mac app store, I had some audio dropouts, but mainly clicks and crackles under every configuration you could imagine while playing back anything that I recorded through any outboard gear.

It was weird, because sometimes it would record the clicks to the audio file, and sometimes it would play clicks at random, simultaneously with recorded click on playback of recorded audio. I recorded audio while my USB interface was plugged into both USB 2.0 and 3.0 slots, on different boot-ups, of course.

I tested with Studio One v2.6.1, Ableton 9.1, and Felt Tip Sound Studio. Bear in mind that I had all the latest recommended drivers and kexts installed....


...Anyway, after about 4 straight days and nights of research, trial and error, and several grey hairs later, I tried disabling XHCI mode in the bios (this shuts down usb 3.0 support) and I was back in business! No clicks or artifacts. I also deleted the genericUSB******* kext from S/L/E, and repaired disk permissions, although not really sure if I needed to do that to achieve my goal.

So it seems that USB 3.0, XHCI, my USB 2.0 interface and my Haswell CPU aren't jiving together... and the solution is to disable XHCI in the bios if you like your recordings to be click and artifact free.


There's probably a way to enable XHCI and and have Some USB 2.0 slots handle the interface the way a normal USB 2.0 slot would without having XHCI enabled in the bios.... maybe some bootloader edits or kexts?? .... for now, it works and I can do what I have to do until Someone provides a proper solution.


Hope that helps either you, or anyone else who is dealing with the above mentioned issues or similar.

 

My Haswell 4770K never had problems with DPC. Yes I do have high DPC, but it's caused by faulty drivers for my audio interface causing CPU spikes, however I never had any dropouts with it, so I got used to it.
If I had any issues, I'd start by disabling HPET in BIOS

Well, it's the same with iPhones, so I don't think it's Microsoft fault.

XP are great, excellent OS for stability, unfortunately they are aging. Basicly I share your opinion.
However, my W7 x64 installation takes up only 2.75GiB. It's fully working system, missing only unnecessary stuff, like Windows Help, Speech Recognition, Microsoft Sam, Indexing, etc.
Packed with all FX, VSTi and DAW I need, total size is about 3.84GiB.

WinXP x64 is great as long as you have drivers for it, otherwise it!s not really useful.

By the way, since Windows is not real-time OS, it's not built to run latency-free audio. If all VSTs could be converted to linux, I'd be on Gentoo for a long time
(or RTLinux)

 

Fantastic, just the sort of input I was looking for

So, the bottom line seems to be that there's no fundamental problem with Haswell chips, but more that there's a chance DPC issues can be experienced as a result of the various power saving features the processor/mobo combinations now offer (and tend to have enabled by default?). That's much better since it means of course that any such problems encountered can likely be fixed with a bit of guidance and some bios tweaking. Something I personally am willing to live with if it comes to it.

I'll be running W7 pro for now, but it's good to know you've got things sorted on a W8 machine too. It means of course that, again, it's possible to fix DPC issues on that OS if you do have any. Fairly simply too from the sound of it. Funny you should mention the NVidia detail too... Scan's pro-audio 3XS builds use Haswell chips, but if you go through the customisation options they specifically state "Due to driver problems with Pro Audio hardware, we are not supplying NVIDIA cards in audio systems at this time". They'll let you choose a Radeon card if you want to. Maybe that backs up your point? I'm also now wondering if the references to DPC latency issues which I read with regard to what I took as on board audio might actually have been people (gamers) outputting audio via and NVidia card over HDMI. I'm not sure, but still, it looks like a point to take on board is to stay clear of NVidia cards at present. I'll be using the onboard graphics myself.

Great advice, thanks I hadn't considered the point on choosing a mobo which doesn't offer a ton of features, but given what I know now it makes sense. That said, I'm looking at a mid-range board anyway, the Asus Z87-A, or the Z87-Plus maybe (simply because of the extra USB3 ports and such for not much more cash... thinking about the future). Being familiar with Asus from previous builds, and having read some worrying things about MSI's rep, I think this is the best choice. Also... going back to Scan's pro-audio Haswell machines again... they use an Asus Z87-Pro in at least one of their builds. So, again, if I do run into DPC problems I can have even more confidence that they can be fixed. Go Asus!

With regards to XP... I'm still using a 7 year old Core 2 duo build running XP! Aside from the age of the machine, the fact that XP support get's dropped in April '14 is a factor in making me look at upgrading now. My current PC is a dual boot, one side music production, all stripped down to the necessities, and the other a day-to-day workhorse. So personally I'm ready to move up to W7 now, and I've checked that my outboard gear has the drivers to match already. But you're right - XP has had a good run and served me well too.

Again, thanks a ton The more details on what fixed DPC issues for different people, the better. This is all reference material that I could come back to, and which I hope will be just as useful to anyone else who's a step ahead of me and already need a hand. Awesome stuff - particularly for anyone else going down the Hackintosh route!

Great again - thanks a lot

So far these responses have painted a pretty satisfying picture and have definitely set me much more at ease following the horror stories I'd read. Just goes to show what a little perspective can offer. Anyone else - please keep adding your input if you've had and overcome DPC issues using a Haswell chip. I came here since I couldn't find a clear dedicated thread anywhere directed at music producers in this position, so maybe this could be it .

Main points in summary so far:
- No evidence to say Haswell has point-blank pro-audio system killing DPC faults.
- Turning off the CPUs various power saving features and other 'bonus' elements via bios is often the necessary fix - see suggestions above.
- Some evidence to suggest that Asus boards may be good choices for pro-audio? (perhaps needs more validating)
- Some evidence that having an NVidia GPU card installed can cause DPC latency issues on Haswell systems

 

i had a similar question.

I'm using an asus g73sw which is a gaming laptop. I really have no problem working on it and it's been great since i got it. I been thinking in upgrading to windows 8 + msi stealth which comes with haswell.

I probably open my own thread cause it will deviate from this one lol


Overall.. I had think that windows 8 might have a bigger impact than haswell cpu on latency or drops. I'm not sure cause i haven't really try it out, only thing that i know is that a lot of vst and certain daws have trouble with windows 8. :/

 

Hello,

My experience with my new i7 4790K (non OC) / Asus ROG Maximus VII Hero motherboard w/ lastest BIOS / 32 GB RAM 1600 MHz / French Windows 7 Pro SP1 64 bit: I've many sound crackles on Focusrite Saffire Pro 14 when playing "live", only one VSTi from REAPER x64 or Cantabile Solo x64, or from standalone Kontakt 5.3.1.

DPC Latency Checker (dpclat.exe v1.3.0) reports several peaks to 4000 µs, every couple of seconds!

Finally the problem was fixed as soon as I've uninstalled "Asus AI3 Suite": now, DPC latency is between 35 and 55 µs (very rare peaks up to 400/600 µs), and my Saffire Pro 14 works like a charm (64 buffers, 48000 Hz).

I hope this tip can help...

 

It doesn't surprise me at all, docam28, that an ASUS or any of these mobo manufacturer's utilities causes DPC spikes, really, since they all introduce some kind of dynamic control of mobo/cpu features and dynamic control causes DPC spikes. Not necessarily and not 100%, but dynamic and power saving features are the first suspects when I'm looking for what's causing the DPC spikes and it never fails. ;)

 

nope no issues and ive just recentally upgraded to
i7 4970k devils canyon (the haswell re submit from the 4770k ) at 4.8 ghz
asus w97 workstation motherboard
r9290x graphics card ]
32 gigs g-skill ripjaw ram
its amazing the new devils canyon cpu just amazing