Proper PC tweaks

I upgraded my DAW. I have an ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe gen 3 motherboard with 16 GB of ram running 8 cores at over 3 GHz and 2 solid state drives. My sound is through FireWire with a presonus 16.4.2. I have followed the system tweaks advised by the various DAW sites including Avid (running pro tools 10 along side). However, I have frequent drop outs. It has become better by lowering the number of buffers and changing SONAR X2 so that it runs in above normal priority.

Is my system too fast? Should I undo the tweaks? I thought that after updating my 3 core AMD system, 2.x GHz, standard drives and only 8 GB of ram that I would be cooking but instead it is worse.

Maybe I missed it somewhere, but what operating system are you using? And 32Bit or 64Bit?

The two chips (firewire) that could be considered in the "generically working" category would be the Texas Instruments (or more popularly known as TI) and the Agere. Most others do need to be confirmed as working from end users.
 
EDIT: Although the older firewire 400 that these chips use is fast fading away, so how relevant it is now or int he near future is probs doubtful

Another thing to consider is that many "tweaks" actually remove built-in dynamic functionality, and lock it to something more "static." Be very careful in what is being tweaked, and understand what that tweak is actually doing.

It is kind of disappointing I had this computer built especially for me to use as a daw, 8 cores, solid state drives fast processor 3 FireWire ports several USB ports, spent almost $3,000 and it has dropouts. So far the only way I can minimize them is to disable antivirus and set the SONAR process to above normal in priority. Which hardly makes sense to me because this computer is so fast that hardly anything causes the CPU to go above 10 %.

NYSR,
 
Check your Firewire Chipset as Eric has mentioned, but, also turn off Core Parking.  See below link for more information.    I had the same problem with dropouts on my system before turning off core parking.   You may also want to check in your System Bios to see if there are any ASUS power saving utilities enabled, if so you may want to turn them off as well.
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Windows-7-amp-Core-Parking-a-better-way-to-Turn-It-OFF-m1861804.aspx
 
Regards

markno999
turn off Core Parking.  

Forgot about that one, yes I did that too. Like I said, it has been about a year. 
I seem to recall that there's also a multiprocessor tweak in one of the SONAR config files that I did. 

I checked out the FireWire chipsets.

It took me a while to nail them down. In an add on card is a StarTech 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller with chipset TSB12LV21 which is specifically stated by Presonus as NOT compatible. On the motherboard is a VIA 1394 with chipset VT 6315 which is listed by presonus as compatible and this is the port it is plugged into.

I did the registry tweak to inhibit core parking.

Driver settings in SONAR indicate that my Presonus StudioLive 1602 (sometimes 1642) is using ASIO at a bit depth of 24 and a sample rate of 44.1

ASIO reported latencies are 6.3 ms input, 8.1 ms output, and a total round trip of 14.4 ms (634 samples). Dropouts occur only occasionally during playback or while recording.

Let's see if the core parking helped.

If your CPU is not showing high usage, the main culprits for dropout are buffer settings (extreme high or low), or driver conflicts.
 
I honestly do not know a great deal on FW... but when I got my Saffire people here advised me specifically to disable the onboard FW if I ever got a card replacement (I never did). That recommendation to me makes me wonder if your FW card is "competing" in some way with the onboard FW. I do not know the answer to this, but given your situation I would be very tempted to pull that FW card out of the system to check things (especially since you know it is not compatible with your Presonus).

NYSR
I checked out the FireWire chipsets.

It took me a while to nail them down. In an add on card is a StarTech 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller with chipset TSB12LV21 which is specifically stated by Presonus as NOT compatible. On the motherboard is a VIA 1394 with chipset VT 6315 which is listed by presonus as compatible and this is the port it is plugged into.

I did the registry tweak to inhibit core parking.

Driver settings in SONAR indicate that my Presonus StudioLive 1602 (sometimes 1642) is using ASIO at a bit depth of 24 and a sample rate of 44.1

ASIO reported latencies are 6.3 ms input, 8.1 ms output, and a total round trip of 14.4 ms (634 samples). Dropouts occur only occasionally during playback or while recording.

Let's see if the core parking helped.

Thanks - what is you audio interface ASIO Buffer Size set to?  To have the 14+ millisecond total roundtrip latency reported in Sonar, for a 24-bit 44.1 k setup, this value is like a bit larger than it needs to be.
 
On my system, I have ASIO Buffer Size set to 128, and a Sample Rate of 48 k.  It processes at 24-bit.  In Sonar, the Sample Rate matches the 48 k, and I record at 24-bits.  I have input and output latency values in Sonar of 4.7 ms and a total roundtrip latency of 9.3 milliesconds.  The input /output number of samples are each 224, and the total roundtrip number of samples is 448.
 
I think if your ASIO Buffer Size can come down to 128, that you would likely get your latency to around the same values as I run with, and this would likely get rid of those dropouts.
 
Some interface software control panels use sliders to adjust the buffer size, and call it something other than ASIO Buffer Size - like Number of Samples, or sometimes simply a number.  Whatever the name of it, or the mechanism, you want to get that total roundtrip latency value down to or just under 10 milliseconds, which is a pretty good balance between everything.
 
I think you are pretty close.
 
Bob Bone
 

So, what is your current ASIO Buffer Size, and what is your current Total Roundtrip Latency?
 
Bob Bone
 

OK, several days into this, it appears that the core parking was the big culprit. I can have ZERO droupouts even with the anti virus running now. So if I forget to disable it until reboot, I can still fly.
 
Thanks again.

That is what concerns me with cloud computing. I need to be online for some of my programs to operate. So I limit internet access and run those programs only when I need to access the cloud.

eric_peterson
And what happens to our data when terrorists blow up multiple redundant server farms concurrently after we've all bought into the fad? Potentially a huge problem if big businesses made the switch and something awful happened, a digital 9/11 ... I am not a fan of single point of failure solutions.

Right... or when terrorists detonate an EMP bomb over our major cities.
 
As a society, we're putting way to much trust in digital technology.