Help with performance issues

Hi guys. I need some help with poor system performance. I will try to give a lot of detail.

Bacially I want to use Sonar for mixing purposes only. All my tracking is done on a Korg D32XD machine. At 24bit, (which I always record at) it's maximum is 16 tracks but I need 24 in most cases. My goal is to be able to get around this by mixing the songs in Sonar.

I have a Dell Pentium 4 3.06Ghz Laptop with Hyperthreading, 2GB Ram, 100GB 7200RPM HDD, Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Sound Card, Nvidia GeForce FX Go5200 64MB Video Card.

The hard drive has two partitions each containing their own operating system so I can choose on boot up. One is for normal use..games, internet, work, whatever else and the other solely dedicated to music production. Only the nescesary drivers have been installed on this drive. It has been tuned using the tips on musicxp.net and the only application installed is Sonar 6.2 Producer Edition. Everything that is not needed has been disabled.

I started experiencing fairly eratic performance so I brought a 320GB Firewire HDD which contains all the audio tracks. This has not made much if any difference.

So far I have tested a couple of projects which contain 14 tracks. I have used a combination of EQ's and plugins on these tracks (about 20 in total). When I hit play, the computer is seemingly cruising, the hard drive never goes over about 5% and the processor gets to about 14% at the very most. From nowhere it jumps to 100% causing the music to stutter severeley. Playback will never get through more than about 30 seconds before this happens. I have tried every combination of latency and buffer settings, tried turning off the multiprocessing engine, tried disabling Hyperthreading in the BIOS, tried messing with sound and video card settings etc.

I also thought it may be just one plugin causing the problem so I did an experiment and used a range of completely different plug ins only to have the same issues.

What are optimal settings for mixing in your opinion? Are my problems most likely Hyperthreading related? I have no idea.

I am becoming very frustrated because I know other people are getting alot more out of Sonar with machines that have half the specs of mine.

Am I being realistic to think I can get a minmum of 24 tracks with about 24 processes going on my machine or should I just wait a LONG time til I can afford a kick ass desktop?

I know I can freeze tracks etc but I would like to think I can push the machine a lot more before I have to start doing that.

I'm really loving how Sonar is set out and how easy it is the use but this is pissing me off no end.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Even though the Audigy isn't the best card for this, you should be able to mix with it. Recording with low latency might become a big problem, but since you only want to mix I wonder at what latency you work now. Do you use WDM or ASIO? For mixing a latency of 40-80 is good enough: everything is already there and recorder so low latency itself isn't really necessary anymore. If you have latency very low right now (below 10, if that's possible on the Audigy) try setting it to 40 and seee what happens. Go higher until it works. If you have to go TOO high (like up to 90-100) something else is causing problems or the Audigy just isn't up to it.

You might also want to set the Buffer Size on the Audio General tab higher (in steps of 128): default is 128, so set it to 256 or 512.

hmmm. I'm thinking it may well be the audigy after reading your replies. I pretty much have to use a latency of about 80-100 to get anything to get decent play back for a short length of time. Can you guys reccomend any good firewire interfaces that work well with Sonar?