Computer specs - can I do this???

  • Thread starter Thread starter noisedude
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Is $100 for a 1GB of RAM a lot of money? Geez, RAM is so freaking cheap these days unless you're going with the really good over-clocking friendly ram with the heatsinks on them and all that.

Hearing the word: RAM + Budget and not discussing overclocking sounds so rediculous. I remember saving pennies years ago so I could buy a freaking 32MB stick for $100!!! Now we can buy 1GB for less than $100 by corsair and Mushkin- good brands.

Personally the delay between window clicking and programs loading is enough for me to warrant the RAM upgrade- specially when RAM is so damn cheap.
 
I was reffering to cubase SX. I have no experience with sonar. Noted I do often use drumagog on my projects. I could have told you about your projects taking longer to open and of the delays between window hopping but hey....you probably needed the exercise anyway. Good work my little meat puppet. :p
 
Noise you're biggest constraint playing back 24 tracks will be the 4200rpm HD in the laptop. This is what I'm noticing on my laptop (Pentium M 1.6, 512MB ram).

Ford Van is right in that extra ram won't help your track count (assuming your not running plugins). Having said that, I would not want to be restricted to 256MB. Just idling (30 processes running) my laptop uses 180MB. Start GT Pro, it goes to 210MB. Load a project and it's now using 340MB. If I only had 256MB, the swap file would be getting busy, not good for performance.

If you do go with 256MB, spend the money you saved on an external 7200 usb drive
 
Cheers guys, thanks also to Bulls ... good points all.

Nosferous - we're talking laptops here so RAM is not so cheap, certainly not in this country anyway!!
 
LemonTree said:
I was reffering to cubase SX. I have no experience with sonar. Noted I do often use drumagog on my projects. I could have told you about your projects taking longer to open and of the delays between window hopping but hey....you probably needed the exercise anyway. Good work my little meat puppet. :p
Click to expand...

Actually, you are just a dumbass who got his little theory blown out of the water.

I QUALIFIED my statement about using RAM for stuff like Drumagog in my earliest post.

And the FACT remains that his box DOES NOT need any more RAM to record/playback more tracks! NO DAW needs more RAM to record/playback tracks UNLESS YOU USE SOFTSYNTH'S.

LemonTree, give it up. If you got a paypal account, I will send you a dollar.
 
Bulls Hit said:
Noise you're biggest constraint playing back 24 tracks will be the 4200rpm HD in the laptop. This is what I'm noticing on my laptop (Pentium M 1.6, 512MB ram).

Ford Van is right in that extra ram won't help your track count (assuming your not running plugins). Having said that, I would not want to be restricted to 256MB. Just idling (30 processes running) my laptop uses 180MB. Start GT Pro, it goes to 210MB. Load a project and it's now using 340MB. If I only had 256MB, the swap file would be getting busy, not good for performance.

If you do go with 256MB, spend the money you saved on an external 7200 usb drive
Click to expand...

And again, the fact remains that your DAW software does NOT use the swap file, thus, the amount of RAM does NOT matter in how many tracks you can record/playback at one time!

He already has 256mb of ram in his box. MORE than enough to run his little live recording projects.

You know, you guy seem to have this thing where you HAVE to be right, even when you don't understand a statement somebody made IN THE RIGHT CONTEXT. Get over yourself. ;)

If you follow the context of this thread, and what was recommended, you would better understand my statements.

Whatever........
 
Ford - be nice to Bulls, he raised a valid point on the hard drive speed (which he backed up with personal experience like you did ;)).

To clarify ... I don't already have 256mb ram in my box, I am asking whether that will suffice for my minimal requirements of a location recording laptop. There isn't an option to go more expensive because this HAS to remain a hobby at some point or another, I need to replace my car still and would rather spend any leftovers on stuff like food and clothing. Rent comes shortly after all of those. :D

This has been interesting though.
 
Ford Van said:
And again, the fact remains that your DAW software does NOT use the swap file, thus, the amount of RAM does NOT matter in how many tracks you can record/playback at one time!
....
Click to expand...

Hmmm, not sure you're quite right here. While it may be correct to say the DAW s/w does not use the swap file directly, any RAM constraints will cause Windows to use the swap file.

In my case, loading a project into GT3 required 130MB of RAM. If there is only say 50MB ram left available, Windows will make room for GT3 by moving the memory used by one or more other applications to the swap file. This involves cpu cycles and physical I/O while it's happening. Subsequently if one of those other applications is reinvoked, Windows will have to make room for it by moving yet another app's memory area to the swap file, potentially interrupting what's happening in GT3.
None of this additional background activity would be required if there was sufficient ram for GT3 in the first place
 
Ford Van said:
Actually, you are just a dumbass who got his little theory blown out of the water.

I QUALIFIED my statement about using RAM for stuff like Drumagog in my earliest post.

And the FACT remains that his box DOES NOT need any more RAM to record/playback more tracks! NO DAW needs more RAM to record/playback tracks UNLESS YOU USE SOFTSYNTH'S.

LemonTree, give it up. If you got a paypal account, I will send you a dollar.
Click to expand...


Yeah I've got a paypal account. apaterson1@tiscali.co.uk As the dollar is pretty much worthless against the pound, make it $5 and I'll stop pointing out what a self opinionated unreasoning idiot you are.

Again....peace :)
 
Clues obviously come very cheap in your neck of the woods...and as you so often point out are totaly over priced.

I think all the questions asked in this thread have been answered. Good night kind sir. :)
 
Yes, I DID answer them quite well.

I didn't say I would pay for the whole clue, only that I would send you a dollar to buy one. In your case, I would be contributing maybe 1% of what a clue for your pinbrain would need.
 
Well, Nik, now you get my "ideas". While you got some good stuff here, nobody has the exact system you are looking at. I don't either. I do track with a POS that has an old Athlon 1200, 512Mb Ram, and 133Mhz FSB. I have recorde 4 simultanious tracks, while having 8 others loaded and playing. It doesn't have any real issues doing this, and has tracked most stuff very well. Once in a while it glitches, but I'll bet even high end systems do that. Ram is not always the biggest bottle neck, but if you only have 256Mb, and you have 10 tracks running, Wav files, about 32Mb each, that would mean you have more info loaded than memory. (320Mb). Where does the computer store said info? On the hard disc, somewhere. Most programs use their own paging file, or temp file, so not technicaly Windows Swap file. It is still somewhere on the hardrive though. Here in lies your potential bottleneck.
With 256M of RAM, The computer has to move stuff from RAM, where it is trying to utilize the files, to the HD. With enough of a buffer, RAM in this instance, with a small part of cache on the PCU, this bottleneck is not a big deal. 256 might be just fine. No one can actually answer that in your particualr instance. Ed pointed out his ran fine with 256. Someone else can have trouble with 512, or even 1Gb. No definitive answers here. Even the exact same system, can run differently under 2 seperate users.

I do know that I can edit video, a huge resource hog, on my laptop. It's a P4, 1.7, with 512Mb RAM. It's slower than my PC, but still does an acceptable job. The bottleneck is mainly in the FSB, not going as fast as RAM, or what the HD can do.
 
No, what I said was that I loaded up a session that had about 26 tracks, with loads of edits, and a bunch of plugin's. With 512 of RAM, I noted the the cpu usage and HDD usage. Then, I took out a stick of RAM to reduce to 256.

The HDD and cpu usage did NOT change with more or less RAM.

The amount of RAM WILL NOT EFFECT HOW MANY TRACKS YOU CAN PLAY, OR EFFECT HOW MANY PLUGIN'S YOU CAN USE UNLESS YOU ARE USING SOFTSYNTH'S!

It is a freakin' FACT! I guarantee that anybody that has straight up music tracks with no softsynths of any kind running can run their projects with whatever.

CPU and harddrive/harddrive controllers make up the MOST difference in how many tracks you can record/playback/process on your system. DAW's DO NOT need to pass the audio through RAM. The data stays on the disk, and UDMA functionality between the HDD and cpu apply! RAM doesn't enter the picture in DAW software! And what little it does has almost NO effect on track/plugin counts!
 
Ford Van said:
RAM doesn't enter the picture in DAW software!
Click to expand...

So why does Task Manager report GT3 as using 160MB of ram on my laptop?
 
Well, avoiding whether ram increases track count etc... your recording program at the very least will require ram to run, just like any other program. As long as after the boot you still have enough free ram to run the program, if what Ford says is correct you should be fine. That said, I'd like to add my own question. How important is the HD speed? Does 4800rpm (w/ a 2mb buffer or something) cut it? What kind of HD are you using ford? rpm, buffer, seek time.

I ask because I'm having playback issues on my laptop using a firebox. I was told by presonus to upgrade my RAM. I've got about 200mb free, and the playback is choppy. This is when playing back only one track, as well as playing audio through progs like foobar2000. They also mentioned the chipset in my pcmcia firewire card shouldn't be NEC, and I should get one with a TI chipset. Any recremendations? (I have to assume its the firewire, since I experience no problems w/ my internal sound card playing music)
 
The specs of the hard drive, and the the quality of the hard drive controller's driver have a very big effect on your track count.

I run ATA 100 7200rpm 8mb buffer drives. I wasn't experimenting earlier today on how many tracks I might be able to run on Sonar 5. I got to 207 tracks of 24/44.1 and gave up. CPU usage was at 51% and hard drive usage was at 42%. Nifty. I am SURE I could have easily did 300 tracks. Might not have been much room left over for running any plugin's, but, I could get a HUGE track count! :)

Yeah, many manufactures "buy time" telling you to upgrade your machine. Alesis pulled that crap on me many years ago with their rather crappy ADAT Edit card. They assured me that if I started using SCSI Ultra 2 Wide LVD drives that I would be able to transfer 8 tracks at a time. LOL Can you believe that? 8 tracks of 16 bit 48KHz audio, and I need SCSI UW2 LVD drives!

So, I got them. Guess what? I STILL could not transfer 8 tracks for any more than about 15 seconds!

So, Presonus will tell you to get more RAM. When that fails, they are going to tell you the OTHER DAW MYTH, whick will be to reassign the IRQ of your something or another.

IRQ! LOL Just wait. I bet they suggest that. ;)

Anyway, I am not that "up" on laptop technologies. I DO know that you can do MUCH better than a 4800rpm 2mb buffer HDD. Maybe look at one of the USB drives. But, you should be able to run at least 8 tracks no problems.

Not knowing much about the different firewire/pcmcia chipsets and drivers, I cannot advise.

If you were on a regular PC, I would tell you to start looking into PCI Latency Timer issues. But, I am not even sure that laptops have that same issue. Might be worth looking into.
 
A Q for Ford

Ford,
This would be an easy one for you or anyone else out there.
I have a dell with 512mg RAM
I recently upgraded the wife's Dell from 256 to 1Gig RAM as she hates waiting for progs to load. To do this I removed her 256 & replaced it with 2 x 512. She's a happier, yet still impatient, little comp op.
Can I stick the extra 256 into my 512 Dell?
I keep hearing but haven't read that everything has to be double the previous. I've been looking about for an answer but FAQs at Dell & elsewhere don't address the Q & the Dell tech Supp hasn't responded to my email.
Please advise.
Cheers
rayC
 
Depends whether it's the same kinda ram or not ... open it up and see if you can put it in or not. If they're different ages they might be different sized chips (denoting a different and incompatible type of ram) but you might be lucky and get a free upgrade. :)

Laptop ram is a different proposition altogether.

Nik
 
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