Hi everyone,

We are planning to replace our current broadcast streaming workstation with an HP Z8 G5, and before purchasing I wanted to check if anyone has experience running vMix on this platform.

Current setup (working, but being replaced):
- Dell Precision 7960 Tower
- Intel Xeon w5-3423 (single socket, 12 cores, 2.1GHz base)
- NVIDIA RTX A4000 16GB
- 2x Blackmagic DeckLink Quad 2 (Desktop Video 14.5)
- Dante Virtual Soundcard in ASIO mode (Allen & Heath SQ7 console)
- vMix 28.0.0.42 x64
- Daily live streaming operation, 8+ hours per day

Planned new system:
- HP Z8 G5 Tower
- 2x Intel Xeon Gold 6526Y (dual socket — 16 cores each, 2.8GHz base, 3.9GHz turbo)
- NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell 32GB GDDR7
- 2x Blackmagic DeckLink Quad 2 (reusing existing cards)
- Dante Virtual Soundcard in ASIO mode (same audio setup)
- Intel X550-T2 10GbE dual port NIC (for Dante traffic)
- 128GB DDR5 5600 ECC RAM

My main concerns before purchasing:

1. Dual socket NUMA architecture — vMix is known to benefit from high per-core clock speeds rather than high core counts. In a dual socket system, threads crossing the UPI bus between sockets can introduce memory access latency. Has anyone experienced DPC latency or real-time audio issues specifically related to NUMA in a dual socket Xeon configuration running vMix?

2. DeckLink Quad 2 reuse — the existing PCIe Gen 2 x8 cards will go into PCIe Gen 4/5 slots. Backward compatibility should be automatic, but has anyone confirmed this works without issues with Desktop Video 14.5 or newer?

3. Intel X550-T2 10GbE NIC with Dante Virtual Soundcard — any known DPC latency issues with this NIC under heavy vMix load?

Context: on our current Dell system we experienced audio corruption (pops, dropouts) in the HD-SDI output after several hours of operation. We identified high DPC latency from ndis.sys and BlackmagicIO.sys as the root cause via LatencyMon, and a Windows cumulative update (KB5083769) that worsened the issue. We resolved it by uninstalling the update, setting CPU affinity for vMix to avoid the most interrupt-heavy cores, and applying MMCSS tweaks. We want to ensure the new hardware does not introduce similar or worse latency issues.

Any experience, advice, or official guidance on dual socket Xeon configurations with vMix would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.