Will more RAM help me run more Reverbs / EQ's?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ben Logan
  • Start date Start date
Ford Van said:
If the "more RAM= more plugins" were true, then I little test I ran a while back just wouldn't have made sense!

I have a project that was running at around 85% (average) cpu usage with 512 or RAM installed.

I pulled out one of the 256 chips of RAM, and went back and ran the project again. Guess what? It ran with 85% (average) cpu usage.

This was a project in Sonar, with about 29X 24bit 44.1KHz files running. The plugins were a bunch of different things, RoomVerb2, PSP Lexicon PCM 42, several instances of Sonitus Multiband, several compressors, an amp emulator. 23 plugins in all.

The only difference I noted between 256 and 512 of RAM on a DAW is that the response time of open/closing windows, opening applications, etc...was slower with less RAM, and that could be expected.

I don't think that plugins even use 1mb of RAM each. I can assure you that you will LONG run out of cpu power before plugins start to drain your RAM to the point of them not running.

You need MORE CPU. More RAM might certainly help your work flow, but it really isn't going to gain you any more plugin instances.

A UAD-1 card would be great! :D
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Thanks for chiming in FordVan. I appreciate the RAM vs. CPU primer I'm getting here. I'm more concerned about plugin power than workflow, so your test seems to suggest RAM wont help move me significantly closer in the right direction.

Re: UAD-1. Got one. Love it! If the "forget the RAM" camp wins out, I may put my RAM money toward the 1176 LN, since I only have the SE version so far.
 
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the bottom line (from my eperience with running a daw on crappy computers) ben is that yes ram is important but as i said earlier you just cant make the math with ghz of processing and mb of RAM its not a number game, if there was a mathmatical formula for determining how well your recording software will work it would be incrediblely complicated.

i for one say if your running into your virtual mem during normal operation of your DAW, you need to shut off services/background programs(exspecially antivirus), run an ad-aware scan, and overall tweak your operating system (www.tweakxp.com), that being said, if you cant get out of the virtual memory usage, then yes, upgrade to 512(for alll we now you could be running the most RAM taxing software on the market)
 
Another thought on bottlenecking-

Check the speed of your frontside bus/north bridge. You can have all the RAM in the world, but if your frontside is slow, it won't make much of a difference at all.
 
TuoKaerf said:
Another thought on bottlenecking-

Check the speed of your frontside bus/north bridge. You can have all the RAM in the world, but if your frontside is slow, it won't make much of a difference at all.
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I think I remember my frontside bus being 100 mhz. I'm pretty sure that's dead slow. I've got to check it though. Thanks for the tip Tuo.
 
Im suprised no-one mentioned anything about a faster hard drive. Hard-drives have a huge effect on plugins also.
 
Maybe this is relevant:

Ok, living at the parents house temporarily...................anyway, I setup my mom's new computer yesterday.........emachine that she got at a Best Buy Christmas sale for $150. I just hooked everything up, uninstalled all the bs that comes with a new pc (aol, trial virus protection, etc.), and installed my usual free virus scan and spyware stuff.

Since my recording gear is all packed away in the attic, I started getting an itch to record a couple of tracks in Cubase, even though I knew I would'nt be able to do much on mom's low buck emachine. Mom won't mind a little Cubase action on her pc. :D It's a Emachines T3406, 2.9 Celeron D, 256 mb ddr, 7200 rpm 2 mb cache 80 gb hard drive, onboard sound and video; a pretty decent internet machine but pretty light on ram for my taste.

So, I have nothing to record with but my acoustic........zilch. I scavenged an electret mic element from an old usb dictation mic and wired it up to a mini plug. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I grabbed the ASIO4ALL driver so that maybe I could get some decent latency. I used it in the past, before I got a decent ASIO sound card, so I was familiar with setting it up..........figured maybe I'd get 10 ms latency anyway. Plugged in the mic, setup the bus's in Cubase, set the latency to 10 ms. Not even a glitch so I gradually dropped it down and ended up with 2ms. Damn, not bad. The onboard sound even supports 24 bit 48khz recording.

I remember someone in another thread talkin up the Celeron D's a bit so I figured I would give it a little test. Surfed over to RawTracks.com and grabbed a 22 track sample of the product. I imported the tracks, hit play and everything ran smooth..........2ms latency. Ha! I could'nt believe it. 24 tracks (2 tracks copied) @ 2ms latency, not a glitch in site. How about 48 tracks? Not a problem either.

Now the real test.......some plugins. All I have on hand at the moment are the standard Cubase plugs, but should suffice for a little testing. So, I drop back down to 24 tracks. Pile on a combo of 24 plugs (one on each track) including reverb a, reverb b, roomworks, mod delay, and double delay. The cpu meter is pegged as I hit play and it sounds pretty nasty. I ended up bumping the latency way up to 23 ms. But hey, it's running smooth although the meters are running a little slow.

To sum it up........it's a cheapo T3406 Emachines pc, Celeron, 256 mb ram, 1 hard drive, onboard sound and video, Cubase SX 3, no special daw settings, virus protection running, and spyware protection running. 48 dry tracks @ 2ms latency and showing 30-40% cpu usage. 24 tracks and 24 reverb/delay plugins running @ 23 ms latency and showing about 75% cpu usage. Able to track at 2ms latency. All this on mom's cheapo Emachines. :eek:

Hell, it probably smokes my daw.
 
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Just run one or two reverbs on a buss so you don't need so many instances of them.
 
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