How much Memory to really boost the cpu?

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seanplaysdrums
Posts: 6
Joined: Mon Jun 20, 2005 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: MacOS
Location: boise, ID

How much Memory to really boost the cpu?

Post by seanplaysdrums »

I am not getting the best performance that I wish I could out of my dual 2ghz g5. I allready have 3.5gigs of ram and just installed a seperate hard drive for audio.
Would installing more ram help the cpu? When I open activity monitor it still says I have plenty of ram left. I want to be able to run a few VI's with out the
cpu meter maxing out. thanks
chrispick
Posts: 3287
Joined: Thu Nov 18, 2004 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: Unspecified

Post by chrispick »

You have plenty of RAM. I can't imagine that's negatively impacting what you want.

To consider (if you haven't already):

Higher buffer settings will avail you more CPU power. The trade-off will be greater latency when playing VI. Usually, I begin tracking VIs at a 256 buffer setting. Once the CPU meter starts to hover close to red, I switch to 512. I find that 512 is often offers a workable compromise between proc strain and latency.

To note: Some VIs simply require a lot of CPU power to do their thing. For example, a soft synth that runs with a lot of changing filters, delays and what-not often needs more CPU attention than a soft sampler simply playing back sampled notes.

Also, decreasing polyphony on your VIs can help. The fewer voices they have to generate, the lesser the strain on the CPU. I often find that polyphonies are preset to be higher than I need. For instance, if I'm only playing a melody line on a VI, I don't need 32 voices to do it; often, I can cut that in half.

Don't know if this helps. Hope it does.
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