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[stricko]

Hi, I'm running MC19 on W7 64bit, with a library server and several clients. Recently started upgrading some of my music collection and have a small but growing collection on SACD images, some 2 channel, some 5.1. I've noticed on one of the clients, that playback is buffering, every 2-3 minutes, and wondered what might be the bottleneck.

Client is Gigabut GA-MA78GM-S2H based, Athlon 64 x2 6000+ with 4gb ram (DDR2-800), and an 56gb SSD. Graphics is Radeon HD 4550, 512mb. Audio out over HDMI. Network is wired Gigabit. Network server is very similar, but with a stack of hard drives.

Client seems to be struggling with SACD playback overthe network from the server, with poor mouse response,  & visualation stuttering or stopping. Stop playback and system response seems fine. Nothing else running on client. To see if the problem was network related, I copied an SACD image to the local SSD, and this improved things. No buffering breaks during playback, but system still seemed to be struggling (poor mouse response)

Otherwise performance is good. Video playback is fine, up to and including Blu-ray disk and images.

So, my thoughts were that it might be....

• Client Memory. Theres only 4gb, and the GPU seems to be taking a chunk of it.
  
  Network. Not sure what else I could do to improve this....
  
  Server memory. Again only 4gb, some being shared by the GPU
  
  Motherboard... Does the whole thing just need an upgrade......

Any thoughts on possible solutions, or what further diagnostics I might try?

[JimH]

It could be a network problem, or lack of CPU power.  Try moving it to a location that currently does work.  This should tell you which problem it is.

[stricko]

Is SACD image playback more cpu intensive that blu-Ray image playback? And likewise network utilisation for a 350mb SACD track vs a 30gb blu-Ray image. Bringing the image onto the client stopped the buffering, which points to network. There is another pc based client that shares most of the network path, that I can repeat the test on. It wasn't running when I had the original buffering though. I'll post results when I have them...

[stricko]

Been watching playback using Resource Monitor. Looks like it's a cpu power issue. One processor flat out. Only seems to be a problem for 5.1 material, normal SACD images play ok with much lower cup usage. Ordered a much beefier cpu from eBay, let's see if that does the trick.

[6233638]

Do you have Memory Playback enabled? That increases the CPU requirements for SACD playback to ridiculous levels since MC19.
It may still be a CPU issue though, multichannel SACD is still very demanding even without it. But my system can decode >18 channels of SACD in MC18 (multi-room playback) and struggles to decode 6 in MC19/20

[stricko]

if i knew what memory playback was, i could answer the question.... if its not the default, then the answer is probably no.

i did a quick processor upgrade (courtesy of ebay) and hey presto, problem resolved. Athlon 64 x2 6000+ to PhenomII x4 840 to be precise. Fortunately the other pc's seem to have enough grunt.

Many thanks