Wow…that’s amazing!
I use a Clevo shell laptop, there are plenty of resellers. Mine has a desktop i7, 16GB RAM (but 4 slots so could be 64 if you really wanted to), 1 PCI Express SSD, one M2, and two regular 2.5 inch disks.
It doesn’t have very good battery life by modern standards and it’s pretty heavy but it runs basically anything I throw at it.
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Hello Corky
I use this NUC with Windows 10
There is no problem at all, exept the noise of the fan !
Jacques
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Do you run with power management turned off? I do wonder if these small PCs could overheat if CPU is 100% all the time.
John
Hello John
Do you speak about power devices management ?
Jacques
Hi Jac635,
For Cantabile it’s recommended that you turn off power management. This means the CPU is 100% all the time and isn’t allowed to “throttle down” to save power. This means the system could get hot. Some details are in this thread:
John
I run my NUC PUC in full power mode, using all the tweaks mentioned in Brad’s Glitch Free guide, and so far it seems fine
Cool, thanks.
Hmm - looks like the ASRock DeskMini could be an excellent platform for a small stage PC. @FantomXR: what is your experience in terms of real-life audio performance between an i5 and an i7 - is the performance plus worth the extra cost? So far, I’ve always gone for i7s, but I see others happy enough with i5s…
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No no… I’m with i7 all the time. Since I have a few songs where I get to the limits of Cantabiles Engine-Meter I wouldn’t go with an i5 at the moment. But anyway I’d be interested how it performs again an i7 in our application.
I guess it hardly depends on the plugins you use and if these support hyper threading since this is a something unique on the i7s if I remember correctly. I had a talk with Brad some time ago about it. And to test it is on my to do list.
My understanding is the main difference between i5 and i7 is support for hyperthreading. i7 has it, most i5’s dont. This actually isn’t a bad thing for Cantabile since usually you don’t want to use hyperthreading.
Here’s why:
The idea behind hyper-threading is that since each processor core is highly pipe-lined and has multiple execution units by allowing it to execute multiple threads at the same time each thread can (hopefully) use different parts of the pipeline and get more done.
The problem with real-time stuff is that the biggest bottleneck tends to be floating point math - and I don’t believe any current cpu has multiple floating point units in a single core. So you just end up with multiple threads fighting over the floating point math unit - and it actually makes things worse.
I haven’t actually tested this for quite a while now and things may be better in the latest processors, but at the time, enabling hyper-threading and dialing up the thread count to more than the number of physical cores was a disaster - causing it to run much slower.
This is why Cantabile’s audio engine options recommends running at the number of physical cores - not the number of virtual cores.
Brad
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I bet Cantabile is hosted primarily on laptops/nuc with mobile processors so it is probably not that easy: Intel® Product Specification Comparison
It’s more like “most desktop i5 don’t and most mobile i5 do have hyperthreading”. Even some mobile core i3 do have HT nowadays. Intel means maximum confusion most of the times.
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OK, I took the plunge and built a little “live cube” based on the ASRock Deskmini 310 and a Core i5 9600 (6 cores). Runs super-quietly and doesn’t seem to break a sweat on my Cantabile songs. Just did a little simple comparison with my current live laptop - added 10 instances of Valhalla Room (default preset) to an empty Cantabile song. My live laptop (quad-core i7, older generation mobile CPU) runs at about 49% time load, while the little cube runs the same at ca. 29%.
No overclocking involved - plain default config out-of-the box, plus @brad’s glitch-free settings
Pretty promising - and the size of this little marvel is amazing!
Cheers,
Torsten
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Thanks for the feedback.
I’ll order an i5 9600k soon and will use the exact same motherboard, RAM and M.2 as on my other system, which runs an i7 8700k. This should give some interesting results.
I’ll report back.
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I’ve been using a Gigabyte BRIX for the last 3 years. i5 7th gen with a MOTU avb for sound and gechic and Lilliput touchscreen monitors.
Setup has been very stable. I generally have Pianoteq, Blue3 and Kontakt running, and this pc also runs 2 pieces of software for our light show. I sometimes also run Reaper at the same time to record our shows using 12 channels. Multiple asio connections to the same ports works very well.
There’s a newer generation available now.
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Just another quick update: did the usual DPC latency tests - the little cube raced through them with flying colors - no issues at all. Shows that the desktop CPU and motherboard are less prone to the laptop-specific power management issues - none of the nasty ACPI-interrupts.
Pretty impressed so far…
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The only downside: no way to put a nice and friendly Cantabile sticker on it - that would block the fan intake grid 
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Hang on, I thought NUCs used laptop CPUs? Does that model you mentioned use a desktop CPU? I’d be pretty interested in that!