Sorry for the mistake.
You're right; anything below 512 Buffer Size for 88200 Hz will result in crackling noise. 6.9ms is the absolute lowest my system can handle.

Sorry, no deeper experience with threadripper, its a quite new platform.
My gut feeling tells me to use Intel for recording and not to use ASROCK mainboards.
You could try as an alternative my tested Xeon based platform.

If you compare the passmark mixed benchmark results between threadripper and Xeon E5-1650v4 CPU then you will notice that the quotient between "Passmarks / price" is constant between your threadripper CPU and the E5-1650 CPU.
Ok, you do not get the same performance, but you get 60% of the performance to only 60% of the price.

The good thing would be then for you to get a stable mainboard / platform based on Xeon with ECC memory,
quad channel memory and a very good expandability by many PCIe 3.0/2.0 sockets with many lanes per socket.
You get one x16 socket for 1 GPU, which is sufficient.

You can expand this board nicely with add-on PCIe cards for USB3.1 or a very performance 4xUSB3 4xFL1100 chip solution.

I recommend to run this board using Win7 as there you can still "tame" Windows Update to only install important updates (security updates) instead of having with Win10 big changes which at the end is alway called Win10 (Windows as a service).
Kaspersky internet security 2017 / 2018 runs nicely and doesnt block the system.

With this machine I operated without any issues the following RME products:
- UFX
- UFX and RayDAT
- 2 x UFX+, RayDAT and ADI-2 Pro
The performance is very nice.

Here an overview about the system.
Instead of the E5-1650v3 CPU you could take now the E5-1650v4 and by this you can install quicker ECC RAM.
Everything is optimized, CPU blower, Case blower.

The system operates very silently in an Fractal design case which is pre dampened.
All blowers operate also in summber with 5V.
Only the CPU blower is controller by mainboard the rest by the 5V/9V/12V Switch at the front of the case.

The Nvidia MSI GTX980 4G Gaming is just right, energy efficient and even under games it doesnt become hot, only 53°C.
It supports Sony Vegas for Video editing work.

IDLE temperatures: CPU: 33-35°C, GPU 45°C
LOAD temperatures: CPU: 60-70°C (prime RAM, heat test)  GPU: 53°C (fans start to work over 60°C, so they never blow)

The PSU is superior, it works by a switch in so called hybrid mode, that the blower would only blow, if the load / temperature is high. With my system it never blows. So its also extremely silent.

Case and CPU blowers I optimized for max cooling and lowest noise.

Best cooling you get if you remove the middle block for drives and only put in at max 4 SSD/harddisks.

I use currently one system SSD, one for Recording Projects, one 3TB Harddisk for user Data, one 10TB Harddisk as internal backup disk.

By having added a good USB 3.1 gen. 2 expansion card from Startech I can make backups to an external 4GB Drice at a very good performance, Startech also offers nice external closures for USB 3.1 gen 2.

Components and other infos you find here:
http://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/inde … mponenten/

How to optimize the BIOS
http://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/inde … -X10SRi-F/

Found an excellent CPU Cooler and Replacement Blower which works silent and excellent with supermicros Blower Control on mainboard:
http://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/inde … arrow-ILM/

Better cabling and Blowers lead to very good tempeatures:
http://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/inde … al-Design/

Performance Test:
http://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/inde … cks-de-en/

Its simply a matter of taste whether you prefer newest CPU/Mainboard or a proven platform which is from performance / price ratio still on par with the newest Threadripper / Intel platforms.

I read in last reviews (Intel vs Threadripper) that Intel is more performant in IPC, but they didnt tell what they mean with IPC. It could eventually be Inter Process Communication.

In other reviews I read, that esp Games have issues with the many cores of threadripper, why its possible to configure another operation mode, which requires a reboot of the machine. Then the amount of cores is limited to the max amount typical games are able to handle.

Whether other (recording) application have this problem I dont know by heart.

I only want to say by this, that AMD threadripper surely is an interesting platform for some of us, but as it doesnt really offer any price benefit with the high end CPUs, I have certain doubts, whether its a good decision to take AMD for recording. I would take Intel.

Another thing in terms of my previous post .. the next Xeons which are comparable to E5-1650v3/4 are Xeon-M, uniprocessor Xeons with high performance ....

I looked at supermicros boards and board layouts for this new socket. I didnt find yet any compareable board to the X10SRi-F. The workstation mainboards have for my taste a too high focus on Multi GPU system (graphic workstation) and I didnt find yet a server board offering at least 1 x16 socket and then severy very good equiped sockets in terms of PCIe lanes.

So ... eventually getting a combination of Xeon E5-1650v4 / X10SRi-F combination would be an interesting thing for you.

If you want thunderbolt, then you need to look into the consumer market.

AMD supports ECC if the mainboard does, Intel not on the consumer CPUs ...

Therefor I regard my setup still as very interesting, even if its 3y "old" .. but dont worry, it performs and as I said, you can get all you usually need by adding it to the PCIe 3.0 sockets with the Lanes coming from CPU.

Have you read this? https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewto … e0d3172179  It is valid for all DAWs AFAIK

Again, ECC "can" be useful if you run RAID servers or if you have to render for days. Live broadcast systems probably can be helped too. But as I explained before, my situation is

1. Kontakt, single instrument loaded and makes clicking noise under 6.9ms latency.
2. I use it for composing. I do mixing and mastering but it's my personal home studio.

Your recommendation of systems of ECC is not even close to what I'm explaining and trying to get helped for. You're talking Xeon system which has worked well in your case, while I'm asking for update of investigation from RME with my Threadripper system.

Your idea of "consumer parts suck, go with enterprise level" not only ignores my request of help, it's not even a good advice. I worked as Audio Test Engineer helping DSP engineers at Samsung for several years. I composed logo sound for a company. I've won a very small award on indie game scene. I make more money as SDET now but if I ever came across the situation where I need to build a machine which is needed for live broadcasting or rendering machine meant to run for days after days, I'll remember you, salute your way and say "Thank you ramses for your ECC recommendation!"

And if Xeon with ECC RAMs is the only way to achieve <4ms with 32+ instances, then either we're living in two different worlds, or RME has been very lazy optimizing their drivers. I understand such business decision as it was Intel-dominating world for last 10 years, but now we're living the world where 16 cores cost less than $1000, so blaming everything other than Intel days should be over soon. I thought RME would be front of it, but guess not. We'll see after what my future troubleshooting proves.

Now, back to my problem. The reason why I'm suspecting my Asrock motherboard is that the techreport Threadripper review suggests my PC should be able to load 80~90 INSTANCES in Reaper with 96kHz / 64 samples. The one difference I noticed is that they use different motherboard than I do. This is where I'm agreeing with you ramses, that it CAN be my motherboard. I'll keep it open-minded, and will not factor out motherboard as the problem. But you also have to keep in mind that this can be RME problem as well. I may try Lynx card to see if I get a different result.

Last to add: when I emailed Asrock technical support, they replied with response from R&D word-to-word. They gave me instructions to try different PCIe slots, disable BIOS settings and drivers. Then, what they asked me is a step-by-step guide to what I'm doing to measure the latency issue so they can put effort to reproduce my issue, actually to see if it's on their end. And this was done in less than 24 hours. I'm actually impressed with their response.

Coming back to the original question:

Last time I checked (and remember) I can run audio down to the smallest buffer sizes on my Ryzen 1800X. Tomorrow I will put in a HSDPe AIO and check both Live and Reaper again. I will also check for possible memory frequency = infinity fabric audio buffer differences again.

First I have to reinstall Komplete, though, since I had to reset my W10 installation to make Fall Creators running without BSODs.

What Kontakt preset can I use for testing this? Did you check if your Kontakt instance is even running on multiple cores or maybe only running on a single core within the DAW?

I still need to find the Komplete HD, but here is something to begin with:

This was at 128 samples and 70% Live CPU counter load. At 32 samples and 35% load I can run about 80 tracks of this specific test.

More importantly, this was at stock CPU and memory settings, the latter of which could be your problem. Communication between the CCX (CPU Core Complexes) happens via the infinity (data) fabric, the performance of which depends largely on your memory frequency settings. At stock settings that communication is a bottleneck, at memory settings above 3000 MT the bottleneck begins to vanish. My Ryzen 1800X uses 2 CCX, your Threadripper uses 4 CCX.

Try running the DAW only on Cores 0-7 by changing its "Affinity" via Windows' Task-Manager. Report back if this makes a difference while I keep searching for my Komplete HD.

Using NVMes can also cause issues on Ryzen, somewhat depending on the mainboard/BIOS. The latter is another likely source of any dropout issues. I am running my 1800X on an Asus Crosshair 6 Hero, which got lots of clever BIOS revisions and direct community support via the Overclock.net forum.

Ha, I just found the HD and reinstalled Kontakt this very minute (installer still open in the background). I came here to decide what content libraries are needed for the test. Good to see you got it sorted by yourself and reported back for others to share!

Indeed in the old days the so-called server boards with 'exotic' Intel chipsets were the ones that always made trouble. Things have improved in the last years, though, up to important DPC advantages with such boards and matching processors.

One other negative regarding server boards I should mention is the lack of decent onboard graphics, which becomes crucial as you fill up the PCIe slots.

On a seven slot motherboard with no decent onboard video:

2.5 - RayDATs
1 - NMVe drive
1 - Video card

And that's it.

I think it would great if RME would offer a RayDAT with a breakout box so we can save a PCIe slot per card. This is very important now that we have NMVe drives which take up a PCIe slot.

And not to mention that many of us are starting to use 10 Gig to 56 Gig ethernet or infiniband using one of the various xDR type ports and that is yet another expansion slot to be used. Although many server boards do have 10G copper, that is not a solution I care for, especially with 40/56 Gig options being so cheap, on eBay that is.