GoodEnoughGear

Hi folks, just a quick report back on the stability of the 4070, in this case the ASUS Dual GeForce RTX™ 4070 SUPER OC Edition 12GB. I found a number of people suggesting that changing the "Power Management Mode" setting in nVidia Control Panel/Manage 3D Settings/Global Settings tab from "Normal" to "Prefer Maximum Performance" stabilizes the card. So far, it's gone the weekend without an issue which is looking promising.

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, sorry for not paying closer attention to the supported list. Well this morning I did a full uninstall and reinstall and also cleared settings and things are behaving correctly now.

Something a bit odd...am I missing some limitation of NAA? HQP 5.7.4, to Holo Spring 3 via NetworkAudioD 5.0. shows error message for DAC correction for most supported rates. I get a flash message in HQP Desktop bottom left corner: PCM ? No DAC correction for output rate: 1536000/1411200/768000/705600 - No error for rate: 384000/352800 ? No DAC correction for output rate: 192000/176400/96000/88200/48000/44100 SDM ? No DAC correction for output rate: 49152000/45158400/24576000 - No error for rate: 22579200 ? No DAC correction for output rate: 1228000 - No error for rate: 1128960 ? No DAC correction for output rate: 6144000 - No error for rate: 564480 ? No DAC correction for output rate: 3072000/2822400

This will depend on how much data you're pushing - assuming your wifi bandwidth is enough I see no reason why this would be a problem. I have found some satellites (my old Ubiquiti system) don't pass certain broadcast traffic which may affect discoverability, but at least on my Asus X12 mesh I have no issues. I'll let others chime in with the esoteric elements of wifi adapter noise - you can buy all sorts of 'audiophile' hardware such as network cards and switches/routers for wired ethernet which supposedly make a difference, and I assume such folks would sneer at wifi. I fall in the camp of good enough is good enough. If your streamer is good, your connection to the DAC is good (for example Holo Red/Holo Spring) I wouldn't worry about it.

I just have a single, but I have 14900KS with iGPU, so I can dedicate the card to HQP. I see there is quite a bit of this happening, esp. with the 4070 Super. I'll report back if I can stabilize it.

Speaking of 4070 Supers, I have an Asus dual GeForce RTX 4070 super OC edition which is tremendously unstable. Even when I use it exclusively for HQPlayer and the iGPU for the monitor, I'll still get black screen crashes and reboots with corrupted Minidumps and faulting bucket "LKD_0x141_Tdr:6_IMAGE_nvlddmkm.sys_Ada". If I use the card for monitor output, I will get back block artifacts and then the screen will go black while the OS is still running, and I have to remote in and shut down that way. Happens with regularity, done clean driver installs etc. I'm running the card stock with power limits reduced, no additional OC vs stock. @Miska have you run into anything like this before? I'm going down the support route, but I thought I'd check as it happens even just with HQP workload.

Heads up! Intel Computing Improvement App on Windows/Intel and HQPlayer I noticed recently I’ve been having some dropouts in HQPlayer desktop. Release 5.7.3 on Win 11 latest version. I run fanless and throttle the CPU to a little above what it takes to run my chosen HQP config comfortably, and in the past no dropouts...but recently I've been getting intermittent short duration dropouts where the buffer drops fast and then fills again. it was happening this morning again, and I noticed that an “Intel Computing Improvement Program” process was chewing up 4% CPU. That's not something I want so I did some searching. It comes with the Intel ARC drivers but is a separate uninstall, so of course it's got to go. I started to uninstall it, with HQPlayer Desktop running at the time, and the uninstaller notifies me I need to quit HQP to proceed with the uninstall! I quit HQP and continued the uninstall thinking I'll bet this is connected with my dropouts. Sure enough, after that no more dropouts…it seems this application is somehow possibly interfering with HQP, given that it was somehow connected to the HQPlayer process. So just a heads-up, if you've installed the Intel Driver and Support Assistant, you may want to remove this piece of interference from your Intel-based system.

Well hell, messing with too many knobs at once 😵‍💫 Not sure what's happened, but HQP CPU usage is through the roof with 5.7.2 and downgrading doesn't seem to help now. I used to happily run PCM 384 sinc-long at 48% cpu on 10700K and now it stutters badly and runs 72% cpu. Downgraded to 5.7.1 and no difference. Full uninstall and reinstall of 5.7.2 and same issue. Not sure it's HQP but that's what's changed today. Anyone else seeing weird behavior?

Great work on the latest Client release, thanks for all the effort. One hopefully easy update - could we make the default alpha sort case-insensitive? Thanks!

Aaah, OK, I see. I may revert back to the prior version which did resize while we wait for that, the sorting also seems a bit odd, at least on Qobuz, but I need to test properly. Anyway, the progress is admirable, and I recognize that going down the road of making a more slick player interface is no small task!

I just downloaded the new install and HQPlayer Client still seems like it is not able to resize at all, it just snaps back to its original default size. I guess this fix needs to published still. Windows 11 pro, 5120x1440 @125%.

Exactly right! Often systems/motherboards are too optimistically clocked at their defaults when they have no idea what the cooling capacity will be. I have solved choppy audio in VMs by reducing or eliminating turbo entirely and even raising the base clock but getting a smoother CPU load profile so it doesn't spike. Note: The below is NOT designed to max out your CPU, but to demonstrate how there are undocumented aspects to Windows Power Management. My use case is to throttle a laptop to operate fanlessly, so probably the opposite of what folks here want to do. There is much more detail to this with Armoury Crate and Intel XTU in the mix, but the principle is I have found running no Turbo and a higher base clock is better for audio performance than a Turbo profile. Turbo makes the CPU choppy and, in my experience, can allow aggressive processes (especially browsers) to spike the CPU hard enough to interrupt real-time processes like streams. I use Windows Power settings to reduce the CPU max utilization to 99% (or less) to eliminate Turbo behavior - again, there are many ways to do this, and I have my reasons for doing it this way if you are interested. BUT I have found that using the Windows Power Profiles to reduce CPU utilization below 100%, there is a serious flaw - it only addresses the efficiency cores! This creates a degree of instability which can even cause crashes. To set % CPU min and max properly you need to use the command line to address both sets of cores. This is an example: Get your Power Scheme GUIDs by using "powercfg /list" For the Scheme you want to affect, use the appropriate GUID. This is my crappy batch file. Note that there are TWO throttling settings: PROCTHROTTLEM and PROCTHROTTLEMIN1, and the same for PROCTHROTTLEMAX1 and PROCTHROTTLEMAX to address the two types of cores! This is undocumented at the time of my trying to figure this out, even in the command line help. Set DCProcMin=5 Set DCProcMax=99 Set ACProcMin=5 Set ACProcMax=99 REM ******** DC ******** REM DC Min - Efficiency powercfg /setdcvalueindex 27fa6203-3987-4dcc-918d-748559d549ec SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMIN %DCProcMin% REM DC Min - Performance powercfg /setdcvalueindex 27fa6203-3987-4dcc-918d-748559d549ec SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMIN1 %DCProcMin% REM DC Max - Efficiency powercfg /setdcvalueindex 27fa6203-3987-4dcc-918d-748559d549ec SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMAX %DCProcMax% REM DC Max - Performance powercfg /setdcvalueindex 27fa6203-3987-4dcc-918d-748559d549ec SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMAX1 %DCProcMax% REM ******** AC ******** REM AC Min - Efficiency powercfg /setacvalueindex 27fa6203-3987-4dcc-918d-748559d549ec SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMIN %ACProcMin% REM AC Min - Performance powercfg /setacvalueindex 27fa6203-3987-4dcc-918d-748559d549ec SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMIN1 %ACProcMin% REM AC Max - Efficiency powercfg /setacvalueindex 27fa6203-3987-4dcc-918d-748559d549ec SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMAX %ACProcMax% REM AC Max - Performance powercfg /setacvalueindex 27fa6203-3987-4dcc-918d-748559d549ec SUB_PROCESSOR PROCTHROTTLEMAX1 %ACProcMax% powercfg.exe -setactive 27fa6203-3987-4dcc-918d-748559d549ec Anyway, bit of a diversion into the guts of Windows Power Management. Combine this with the understanding that on the Z13 Armoury Crate is manipulating Windows Power Schemes as well as Turbo TDP limits with Intel XTU under the hood based on the Asus Power Modes and you have a recipe for settings of all kinds to be changing without you knowing what is going on unless you really pay attention.

I have found that turbo can cause sudden heat spikes, especially when configured too aggressively, which in turn causes a quick throttling and erratic behavior.

Absolutely - it's a minefield. A lot of manufacturers (Asus for example in my case) will mess dynamically with the power plans as well as clock speed depending on various factors. This is just one way to isolate to a degree the penalty on a process.

Windows 11 Power Throttling on newer Intel CPUs with PCore/ECore architecture So, I have no idea if this will affect HQPlayer - I am doing PCM upsampling which is no strain. However, I have been having performance issues with VMWare Workstation and ran across this piece of advice which has made a huge difference with VMs - specifically I think running on the ECores. This command-line instructs Windows to exempt an executable from any automatic power throttling. Modified here for HQPlayer desktop. Open an elevated command prompt and enter the following: powercfg /powerthrottling disable /path "C:\Program Files\Signalyst\HQPlayer 5 Desktop\HQPlayer5Desktop.exe" For those who are trying to squeeze the last bit out of one of these CPUs give it a try and post back if it makes a difference.