How can I determine where my system's bottleneck is? (i.e. RAM or Processor Speed)

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geneticfunk

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Does anyone know a good way to determine where the bottleneck is on a PC?

I'm running the latest Cubase SX with a lot of VST Plugins etc., and things start making "popping" and "crackle" noises unless I turn up the buffer on my sound card. This makes the latency get bad, though.

I'd like to determine what the bottleneck is here... I think that it's probably RAM (I only have 1 gig of ram installed, and I have a 2.8 Ghz P4 Processor), but I am just wondering if there's a way to test to make sure, so that I don't waste money on something that's not needed.

If I find the bottleneck and widen it, then I will be able to run more VST's, etc. at a given buffer amount without any "popping" or "crackling" than I would before I widened the bottleneck, right?
 
geneticfunk said:
Does anyone know a good way to determine where the bottleneck is on a PC?

I'm running the latest Cubase SX with a lot of VST Plugins etc., and things start making "popping" and "crackle" noises unless I turn up the buffer on my sound card. This makes the latency get bad, though.

I'd like to determine what the bottleneck is here...

It looks like you've already determined it: The sound card.
 
I dont know if I can agree with that, the cause of what he is talking is usually RAM issues, geneticfunk what kind of sound card are you using? how many tracks and VST's are you running before you get to the crackle and pop issue?
 
Also what are you recording at? 24/44? 24/96? (etc)

I'm running a 3ghz with 1gb of Ram and Cubase SX 3 and I don't have any issues.
 
I'm using a MOTU 828 Mk I sound card. I'm recording at 32 bit float/44.1 Khz.

I was having a lot of crackling/etc. when I was running Halion and Fruity Loops as VST's while trying to record audio on 2 tracks in Cubase.

The only reason that I'm using Fruity is becaue my friend is very comfortable w/ that program. To work around the problem we exported the audio from fruity and replaced the Fruity VST with that exported audio in the Cubase project. I'd prefer to be able to just run Fruity as VST inside of Cubase, though.
 
Ram. VST uses lots of RAM. VSTi uses RAM like it's going out of style. Increasing your buffers is not the best solution...get more RAM and hey if it doesn't help, more RAM is always good anyway.
 
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