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CMP Hardware Update

Hello fellow members,

I’ve been otherwise engaged and have not turn up for some time. I am building 2 new CMP machines for friends and would like to share the following experience.

Since the i3 530/540 CPU and H55 MB were no longer available, I had to buy the Gigabyte H61 boards and newer CPUs. I picked H61MA-S2V-B3(no PCI slot), H61MA-S2H(1 PCI slot), Celeron G440 and i3 2120T for construction.

To my surprise, the cheap MB/G440 combo sounded very good even with any modification. Although I no longer have an unmodified H55M UD2H MB for comparison, I can tell that the H61MA-Sxx/G440 is superior to the H55M UD2H/i3 530 combo, by a fair margin.

The G440 (1 core, 1M cache) works at 1600Mhz by default whereas the i3 2120T (2 core 4 threads) can be underclocked to the same speed(16x100). Upon further tweaking, both work at 1530Mhz (16x95.6Mhz lowest possible). Both CPUs sound the same. It is worth to note that the G440 single core @1530 can do up-sampling @192K 121db(tested with Julia@). @145 db the mouse pointer became slow. See below:





I went on to test the current consumption of the S2V MB and I was shocked! The following pictures tell a thousand stories:


P24 Current Consumption, CMP@48Khz (G440@1530 Bios optimized, HDD powered by another supply but USB to SPDIF converter was powered by the MB)




P24 Current Consumption after Chips removal, CMP@48Khz (G440@1530 CMP & Bios optimized, HDD powered by another supply but USB to SPDIF converter was powered by the MB)












With refined method, chips removal are more easy now. I can post if you are interested.

The P4 12V consumption



Occasionally burst up in current (don't know why)




P24 Current Consumption after USB to SPDIF converter unplugged




I believe the SQ improvement of the H61M MB/CPU is due to new power circuit and use of low resistance driver Mosfets, and perhaps new CPU structure. Note that the H55/61/67 chips have similar consumption, but the H61 with some device cut off. The reduced current consumption and high-speed power circuit provide more stable and cleaner DC supply to the CPU and graphic chip etc and ensure better response.

The low current consumption, in particular in the 5V rail, allows easier direct battery replacement. The board will boot up with 4 D size Nimh batteries attached to the 5V rail and it sang wonderfully. It is much more superior to my 5V PS powered by 6V PB batteries + LT1084 regulator. For the first time, I heard the longest lasting and cleanest piano notes from my system (running time not yet tested but will try later).

I also used 2 D size Nimh batteries in parallel to power the 1GB Kingston Ram and the board sang for almost 6 hours. When stopped, the battery voltage was 1.078V(The Ram can run at 1.1V which is the lowest setting of the MB). Of course, this further improved SQ.

I'm not biased towards batteries, I just want to use the best solution for my gear. Use of battery will eliminate most if not all of the RFI from the power source which is the main culprit polluting music, if the battery you use is low on noise and internal resistance. You have to try it in order to believe - good batteries are not noisy at all.

I can highly recommend the H61M motherboards and Celeron G440 as they are exceptionally good value for money and out perform previous H55/i3 series motherboard/CPU in terms of SQ and current consumption. For those who needs upsampling @192K, the G620T or 2100T/2120T are a good choices.

Of note, in order to boot up the S2H MB needed a higher CPU core voltage than the S2V MB. The main difference between the 2 MBs are that S2h has got 1 PCI slot and 2 video converters for HDMI and DVI, whereas the S2v has no PCI slot and has only one video converter for DVI, hence cheaper(only 67USD).

Hope the above information would be useful to members.



Edits: 11/12/11
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