Sonar 3 and video cards

B

Bullet Days

New member
i decided to upgrade my 3 year old computer to run sonar more efficiently. currently, i have a p4 1.7 GHz with (a recently upgraded) 1 Gig of ram. my main hard drive is an 80 gig ata/100, and i have a 120 gig slave. i will be replacing the cpu with a p4 2.4 GHz with 512 cache--the fastest cpu my asus p4b motherboard can handle. i'll also be replacing the main drive with an ata/133 160 gig. i'll have two slave drives--an 80 and a 120 gig. my ram will still remain at 1 Gig (pc 133).

i made the decision to upgrade because sonar keeps dropping out. before, sliding over that buffer slide to the right fixed the problem (most times). now that doesn't work anymore. and i'm getting into all sorts of plugins, so i'll definitely need the cpu power.

about the video card--mine is what came with my computer when i bought it 3 years ago from cyberpowerinc.com. it's an nvidia geforce2 mx/mx 400. should i upgrade that too? i'm not a gamer so i don't need the graphics power, but i'm thinking maybe sonar 3 does?

p.s. i use an maudio firewire 410.
 
Hey...Cyberpower! Local SoCal boys, I see. I got a computer from them 4 years ago. It wasn't bad...

I really can't see what's the problem...What's your CPU meter looking like? What kind of plugins are you using?

Your video card shouldn't have too much of an impact. You might want to try updating the drivers to the latest drivers available from nvidia's site. They update often, and you never know what fixes might occur thanks to this...

I'm guyessing youre running it WDM? I've always experienced that it's best to

1) Close sonar
2) set a different buffer setting in the M-audio panel.
3) Run Sonar again, and run the wave profiler to auto set things, before playing around with the slider, which I almost never had to do...

You could always try running with ASIO, as well...
 
You're really not gonna get much bang for the buck with those upgrades. 1.7 to 2.4 GHz will only be a marginal improvement, and you probably won't see any difference whatsoever going from ATA100 to ATA133 (assuming both drives are 7200 RPM).

You might want to consider waiting until you can afford to replace the mobo and do a more significant upgrade.


In the meantime, as slatkill suggested, try raising the buffers in the M-Audio control panel and see if that helps.
 
No sonar doesn't need the latest and greatest video card just something that can display 16 bit color
 
ya i would also suggest messin around with the settings a bit more first. i have the same specs on my computer with half the ram and i experience very few aduio drop outs. i run several plug in such as vsampler and edirol orchester and super quartet.

I am wondering, isn't PC133 RAM extremely slow compared to what is out now? i am just asking cause you siad you just upgraded it but it hough the 133 stood for the clockspeed and can't you get like 500 mgz clockspeed RAM now? I could be way off base about that though...
 
based on suggestions here, i'm going to hold off on getting the 2.4 cpu. i already bought the 160 gig HD, but between the two it's the more important buy in my opinion.

i think i need to do yet another fresh install of xp and the other programs. my sister's boyfriend did it for me, and he has a habit of tweaking to get good numbers though risking having a very unstable computer. i think he overclocked my cpu to do 1.72. well, it's so unstable now that it can't run windows media player for long, my browser will just close, and worse, the comp will just shut down and reboot without warning. in fact, that happened the first time i tried to reply to this thread. boom, windows encountered an error bla bla bla reboot!

after i do a proper install (with someone elses help this time), i'll try that ASIO driver thing. do i just switch the driver mode to ASIO? is it as simple as that?
 
So is the CPU 1.7 GHz or something else overclocked to 1.7? Because it might make a difference on the suggestions.

For ex., going from 1.2 to 2.4 is a significantly better investment than going from 1.7 to 2.4.

Also, having extra disk space is never a bad idea, but you are not likely to see a performance improvement from the new hdd.

BTW, the automatic rebooting sounds like it could be an overheating problem possibly as a result of the overclocking. In a computer DAW I would personnaly stay well away from overclocking. Stability is significantly more important than speed IMHO.
 
i have a 1.7 that's performing at 1.72, at least that's what it says in the general tab of "my computer." if it's overheating, then i guess the fact that i'm leaving the computer door open isn't helping. and if he did overclock me even the slightest bit, i heard that p4's aren't overclock friendly.
 
The earilest P4s hit the market at 1.4-1.5 GHz and went up to 1.7-1.8 I think. Getting those lower end models to 1.7 was typically easy, but not always a given. later P4s (starting with the Northwood 1.6a) were actually very easy to overclock, but since you have a motherboard that uses PC133 RAM, I guess you have the earlier.

BTW, you know that mild overclocking can typically overclocks the PCI bus that your sound card is working on? That's not a good thing. As your sister's boyfriend to get back to spec. You can get your PCI slots to work at spec either by using a newer motherboard, most of which have a PCI speed locking mechanism that works regardless of CPU speed, or by getting the CPU to work at the NEXT speed level, such that everything is working at a proper multiple...

To move to ASIO, all you have to do is open Sonar and go to Options -> Audio -> Advanced -> Drivers. You'll then have to restart.
 
that's what i was planning on doing as soon as the new hard drive arrives--get everything back to spec. no overclocking, no tweaking except maybe for windows tweaks, but that's software not hardware.

will a complete reinstall of XP into that new hard drive get me back to spec? god i hope so.
 
No no no! Installing and reinstalling wnidows means nothing when it comes to overclocking. You have to go into the motherboard bios and dial the speed back down. Installing windows on an overclocked computer is a HUGE no no. Even the most daring of overclockers don't dare do that...
 
ok, i went into the bios and the cpu speed was already at 1700. i'm not an expert btw. anyway, i looked around for any signs of overclocking, and the only thing i noticed was on "optimization," it was set to "turbo 2." i rolled it back to "normal," saved and exited, and continued booting. i didn't change anything else. don't even know what i did to my computer by switching from turbo 2 to normal.

my comp is still working at 1.72. is that even a significant factor?
 
Last edited:
Wait a moment...you said that you're running a 1.7 overclocked to 1.72... 1.72 is not really an overclock...it's perfectly valid. My 2.4 works at 2.43 without me touching it...this is a Dell motherboard that doesn't support overclocking...

What you adjusted was memory timings which have only the slightest effect on the computing experience.

I'd say if your sister's boyfriend was the one to touch it, tell him to get it back to normal.
 
Sklathill said:
No no no! Installing and reinstalling wnidows means nothing when it comes to overclocking. You have to go into the motherboard bios and dial the speed back down. Installing windows on an overclocked computer is a HUGE no no. Even the most daring of overclockers don't dare do that...
Click to expand...

Sorry to jump in, but why is this a no no?
 
sklathill,

going back to the auto-reboot problem, which you said is due to the cpu overheating, what is the proper temp for the cpu? i'm running sisoftware sandra right now and my cpu's at 48.5C/119.3F. i also have no auto fan speed control.

if i haven't brought it up, after his tweaking, when i run a project on cakewalk, the cpu meter shoots up right away to the 90th percentile range, and a couple of seconds later i dropout.
 
That's perfectly fine. I run my CPUs typically in the 50s Celsius, and most are able to run at spec into the 60s no problem. It doesn't look heat-related, then.

You might have flaky memory.

On your CPU usage, that's how it would respond for me when my buffer settings are too low.

Oh, and whattaguy...sometimes on overclocked CPUs, there will be messed up instructions being passed around and this won't be manifested as a loss of stability, since typically when something wrong gets passed, the application realizes it and simply requests for that bit again from the CPU. OTOH, during things like installation or something similar like compiling your OS kernel, your CPU is just churning away...you're potentially making faulty files for your system to operate from because the CPU is just on the edge of stability.
 
i have 1 gig of ram now, but the 2 256 sticks are as old as the computer--about 2 1/2 years old. the 512 stick i just added last week. can old memory go "bad?" and is there a way to verify it through diagnostic software or something like that?

there was one time that i keep getting the blue screen of death, and it told me something about my ram being bad (forgot the exact term the message used).
 
ANything that you run electricity through can go bad...the potential for electrons to carve paths through silicon that weren't meant to be carved is always there...

Diagnostic software...I know that there are hardware units that can test ram modules. You might want to try running with different combinations of your RAM and seeing how it goes...

blue screens almost always refer to memory addresses. It doesn't necessarily mean that your memory is bad...just that something happened with the data in them...
 
since 512 ram seems to be ok, i'll experiment and take out the 2 256's and just leave the newer 512. i also found the motherboard manual, and i'll study it and just leave all the bios options at the default choices. then comes the task of re-installing everything, but my priority is sonar. does it matter at which manner i install it? before everything else/after everything else, before installing the firewire 410? i'm probably going to install xp first (of course) then install firewire 410, then sonar.

and now that i think about it, the whole episode with the blue screen was just hair-pulling nuts. it was happening multiple times a day. it's gotta be the ram, and i hope the problem goes away when i take away the old ram.

thanks very much for all the info Sklathill, it's much appreciated. please let me know of any other info i should know before i do anything stupid to my computer.
 
I always install all hardware before installing any software. It...makes sense to me. I could explain it, but I'm too tired right now. :) Hopefully it will all work out...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top