Computer Specifications

Gear
21

Programs that can use lots of RAM often have a setting how much they are allowed to use. In Adobe Premiere, you can set how much RAM should be left over for other programs.

You will have better results if you maximize that setting instead of adding a RAMDisk and adding your temp files there.
If your software does not have such a setting, it might help.

So I guess what I am trying to say is: Before trying a RAMDisk, make sure you have checked out all the settings about RAM in the application you are trying to optimize.

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22

Man, I can’t believe it’s even usable with 4 GB ram :open_mouth: even 8 is usually painfully slow for more than one window open at a time.

I have a 2013 Alienware laptop with i7 4700, 24 GB memory, an Nvidia GTX 765M and a Samsung 840 EVO SSD (I think) and it’s plenty fast for any music stuff I’ve ever done on it and even most 3D modelling. It’s slower than my 2020 Dell G5 and my MBA M1 for rendering models/video but I still use the Alienware a lot because the 17in screen is so nice and I have a lots of drive space in it. The only real downside is how thick it is and it weighs about 10 lbs lol. 16GB would definitely be my absolute minimum for a windows machine.

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23

It’s actually not a simple tradeoff, especially once you throw multiple use cases into the mix. You generally need to optimize for different things.

Games are usually not very multithreaded. Most games will benefit more from a processor with a higher clock speed than more cores. So a high clocking i5 will often outperform a lower clocking i7 for games, even with more cores on the i7. Games are also generally GPU-bound and not CPU-bound these days.

Music software can often be highly multithreaded and will take advantage of all the cores, while the GPU is immaterial. However, processor speed will affect latency; the faster the individual cores, the lower the latency. However at the timing used for music this is less of an issue now than it has been in the past.

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24

Hey, my 2 cents.

CPU - whatever, Ryzen or AMD which is not prehistoric has a lot of punch for handling music production
RAM - 8 min, 16 optimum, 32, 64 overkill, anything above 16 GB is either overkill or you have to have a good reason for that
HDD - DAW, VST folder, Sample folder Temp record folder, on SSD … it just saves so much time

… Single-core performance seems quite much more important than the thread number. DAWs nowadays are quite good at multithreading and load balancing, but it’s good to consider that a singular instance of a VST is never multithreaded. (Maybe some VST3 ones nowadays are, but in general VST format doesn’t like to be spread across more cores because of latency issues.) …

I have a template in Ableton, which is around 160 tracks loaded on startup. It’s all from inserts, effects, virtual, hardware instruments, midi-sequencers, and a whole orchestra with various articulations. etc. with SSL mixing console simulation on every single track. When I load it up, it takes some time, something over a minute, but as soon as it’s loaded it hovers around 20% of CPU usage, and whatever I am doing with the template I will get around 50% CPU with 70% spikes here and there. I have Ryzen 3700x, 64 GB Ram, and Ableton on M.2 disk and all the aforementioned folders on some generic Samsung SSD and have 96 sample buffer size. Nothing extreme.

So, although in 2010 one had to consider what kind of a machine he will buy for music production, I don’t think it has to be stressed over too much. nowadays When you set the buffer in your daw it’s how many samples in advance DAW will process before playing the output. The CPU usage in DAWs is … how many samples are actually utilized in the buffer while computing the final output. So when you have 50% CPU usage in your DAW it means that for example with 256 sample buffer in DAW, 128 samples in the buffer are actually used. When you have 0% utilization it means that whatever is your DAW doing it could do it in real-time without using the buffer. But no matter what the CPU utilization DAW will still calculate the 64, 128, and 256 samples before playing the next piece of audio no matter what.

Also, it doesn’t actually matter if your CPU usage is constantly hovering around 80%. As long as you will not get over 100% there’s absolutely no issue.

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