All I know is stay away from Celeron.  Pianoteq hardly works at all.   Pianos don't play, but harpsichord is marginal.

I've used Pianoteq 5 for months with pianos and harpsichord on a Celeron N2840 based laptop.  It was fine.  Performance index was about 19 - nothing to get excited about, but perfectly usable and with no obvious (to me) sound degradation.

Be careful with these brand names - there are a huge number of Celeron CPUs all with quite different performance characteristics.

i am new to Pianoteq. I just downloaded the demo and checked it out.
I am still missing a special midi / audio interface.
I today called a local musicshop and he recommended the Steinberg ur22 to me, which is around 125€.
I am normally using my onboard sound for windows/games and checked pianoteq 6 with that.
I was amazed that I could use it with DirectSound with 4ms latency buffer without ASIO driver.
I installed ASIO4ALL and could lower the latency to 64 samples 1.3 ms (48KHz).
I could even cheat and set the sampling frequency to 96KHz and leave the buffer at 64 samples and still not dropouts with the ASIO4ALL.
I looked up the onboard sound chip and it is a Realtek ACL 1150 http://www.realtek.com.tw/products/prod...ProdID=328
It seems to be an amazing chip (Motherboard was expensive enough though ).
It seems i do not need an additional audio card.

Then I made a stress test. I went to the performance tab. Then i activated playing pianteq by computer keyboard.
I set maximum polyphony to Auto(optimistic).
Then I held the <tab> key, which is pedal and used the mouse to torture the virtual keyboard maximal.
I tried to use all key for around 5 minutes.
Polyphony was >250 almost all the time and performance index rose to 131.
No dropouts. For comparison i set the buffer size to 256 and 512 but there was no difference in sound during the torture test.

My computer is Big Tower with a Intel i7-4790k @4.0 GHz with 4.4 GHz turbo with 4 cores + HT.
It seems that baby will run the piano simulation very fine under any circumstance.

I am wondering why your 4790k did not had the same PI ?

BR
Sven

Right now with a polyphony of 60, and the CPU set to 2.2GHz, PI is 95.

I tried benchmarking Pianoteq 6 on my old FX-8350 and this 1600X, same version, same 11 minute MIDI file:

time Pianoteq\ 6 --preset "Grotrian Concert Royal" --bit-depth 32 --rate 48000 --midi test.midi --wav output.wav

FX-8350 (stock, 4GHz)
real 1m39.393s
user 3m11.149s
sys 0m1.277s

1600X (stock, 3.6GHz)
real 0m57.783s
user 1m48.699s
sys 0m0.429s

So the 1600X is about 76% faster than the 8350. In both instances, Pianoteq 6 only maxed out two threads on each CPU. So, the 1600X could run more instances than the 8350 if I needed to.

A minor point about your measurements is that what seems to mater is the number of real floating point units.  The number of cores may not be as significant.  I note the behaviour of some AMD chips which have four integer units, but only two FP units.  Just a thought.

Looks like Realtek ALC662

Yes, up to 24bit/96kHz, nice option to optimize the latency (when CPU-power is no limitation). Thanks.

00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT HD Audio Controller (rev 0b)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP HD Audio Controller (rev 04)

Ok, thank you. Intel HDA seems to be just the familiy of Audio devices. The audiocodec for analog output can be found with aplay for example (here a Realtek ALC283 on my Bay Trail netbook):

 $ lspci | grep Audio
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Atom Processor Z36xxx/Z37xxx Series High Definition Audio Controller (rev 0e)

$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC283 Analog [ALC283 Analog]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
  Subdevices: 1/1
  Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

http://www.amazon.com/intel-Haswell-420...B015OOEQEC

$249 for 4GB RAM + 128GB SSD so it's a bit of premium over AliExpress. But if you're not comfortable dealing with vendors in China directly, it's worth the extra $15 for the peace of mind.

Mossy wrote:

From using Pianoteq on a few of these machines, here's what some of these numbers roughly correlate to:
   *  5 = 22khz external, 11khz internal, 16 voices, ~8ms latency
   * 10 = 22/11/32/8
   * 15 = 22/11/64/8
   * 20 = 22/11/256/8
   * 25 = 44/22/256/8
   * 30 = 96/48/256/8

I guess it would be more accurate to say the above range correlates to "worse" case settings.  When I fired up the torture test MIDI file, I heard a few dropped notes so I based it on that.  For music we ordinary humans play, you can probably double the settings.  Using a "mere" 100+ polyphony MIDI file to test, the best Pianoteq architecture actually was AMD Kabini.

I am running Linux Mint 17.2 on this fanless PC.  I certainly would not have tried to do the benchmarks under Windows -- just too hard to automate everything.

Now that you mentioned Legacy vs UEFI, that probably explains why my first install worked using EXT2 /boot but then after fiddling around with settings (and choosing BIOS Restore Defaults), I had to reinstall with UEFI /boot.

Here's what Linux reports as the devices:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 0a1e (rev 0b)
00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT HD Audio Controller (rev 0b)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Lynx Point-LP HD Audio Controller (rev 04)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 06)
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM43224 802.11a/b/g/n (rev 01)

Good simulation of reality for example:

... as my Celeron N2930 has a performance index of 21 in my real PTQ-environment.

But the following seems to be a bit pessimistic maybe ...

..., as I can easily play with 21 = 48/48/64/1.3 in your diction.

Nice little fanless PC you bought! Could you get Linux running on it? Can UEFI and "secureboot" be reset to legacy BIOS? Which audiocodec is onboard? Many questions, sorry.

Thanks anyway

I wonder if your overall readings are a little on the low side--only because I tried your rough test of holding the pedal down and swiping back and forth across the Pianoteq virtual keyboard and got a surprisingly high number on my four year old desktop: a peak of 45-48, with peak polyphony of around 230, on an Intel I7 x980 3.33HGZ (Pianoteq hieroglyphics on the processor: m12/s2/f6 x12). Some of the processors you list are definitely faster than this one here.

My goal was to "try" to get close to Pianoteq's index.  But since my logic and that logic is different, only in the middle do we match.  The scale at the top and bottom will be different.

I wonder if your overall readings are a little on the low side--only because I tried your rough test of holding the pedal down and swiping back and forth across the Pianoteq virtual keyboard and got a surprisingly high number on my four year old desktop: a peak of 45-48, with peak polyphony of around 230, on an Intel I7 x980 3.33HGZ (Pianoteq hieroglyphics on the processor: m12/s2/f6 x12). Some of the processors you list are definitely faster than this one here.