I'm trying to help a friend out with his studio. He runs VST32 v5.something... Anyway, he's recently purchased a new system with an MSI Intel 845-based motherboard and Windows XP. His configuration is as follows:
MSI 845 Ultra-AR P4 DDR (478) Motherboard ATA 133 with
Onboard Promise IDE Raid controller
Intel PIII-1.8GHz CPU w/256k cache
1GB Ram
40GB ATA-100 5400 RPM EIDE drive, OS and Apps, Primary
Controller, Master
40GB ATA-100 or 133 7200 RPM EIDE drive, Audio only, Primary
Controller, Slave
2 32x CD/RW drives, Secondary Controller, Master and Slave
Matrox Millenium G450 AGP Twinhead Video, using only one
monitor for now
Layla24 Sound Card running the latest v6.03 ASIO WDM drivers
10/100 NIC
This issue is that when we run Softsynths (SampleTank Synths especially), the CPU shows excessive usage, much the same as his original 400mhz system. This doesn't make since, since we have over 4.5x as much CPU and 2x memory. What could we be missing? One sample song was 4 synth engines, 4 sounds each. Read on:
Eventually, we hope to move the hard drives to each of the ports of the Raid Controller, and leave the standard onboard EIDE ports for each of the CDWriters, thus opening up each EIDE port to be dedicated to one drive. I.E., it would be booting off of the primary Promise Raid controller. However, for now, this configuration should work fine. In fact, the drive registers absolutely no usage during playback.
I have tweaked XP every which way I could think off. The only shared interrupt is the NIC with the USB ports, which aren't even being used at this point. All of the fancy screen fades, etc. are disabled, running in Standard mode, Swap files set to 2048 min and max, to match 2x installed memory. No additional apps are running from what I see. It was a very clean install.
Any help/advice would be very much appreciated!
MSI 845 Ultra-AR P4 DDR (478) Motherboard ATA 133 with
Onboard Promise IDE Raid controller
Intel PIII-1.8GHz CPU w/256k cache
1GB Ram
40GB ATA-100 5400 RPM EIDE drive, OS and Apps, Primary
Controller, Master
40GB ATA-100 or 133 7200 RPM EIDE drive, Audio only, Primary
Controller, Slave
2 32x CD/RW drives, Secondary Controller, Master and Slave
Matrox Millenium G450 AGP Twinhead Video, using only one
monitor for now
Layla24 Sound Card running the latest v6.03 ASIO WDM drivers
10/100 NIC
This issue is that when we run Softsynths (SampleTank Synths especially), the CPU shows excessive usage, much the same as his original 400mhz system. This doesn't make since, since we have over 4.5x as much CPU and 2x memory. What could we be missing? One sample song was 4 synth engines, 4 sounds each. Read on:
Eventually, we hope to move the hard drives to each of the ports of the Raid Controller, and leave the standard onboard EIDE ports for each of the CDWriters, thus opening up each EIDE port to be dedicated to one drive. I.E., it would be booting off of the primary Promise Raid controller. However, for now, this configuration should work fine. In fact, the drive registers absolutely no usage during playback.
I have tweaked XP every which way I could think off. The only shared interrupt is the NIC with the USB ports, which aren't even being used at this point. All of the fancy screen fades, etc. are disabled, running in Standard mode, Swap files set to 2048 min and max, to match 2x installed memory. No additional apps are running from what I see. It was a very clean install.
Any help/advice would be very much appreciated!
