Your Audio Device, Your Audio buffer size, Your Total roundtrip

I know folks have been successful running at 32 samples on smokin machines with heavy hitting projects, so it's the whole ecosystem that has to be considered.  Not a question of just the audio hardware, it's the memory, how much of it, cpu, bus speed, hard drive speed, cache on the hard drive, etc. etc.  
 
Heavy is a vague term as well.  Track counts wouldn't tell the story, nor would numbers of plugins, it's what those plugins are doing, how much memory they are loading up, etc. how the system resources are being utilized.
 
So I may have raised more questions than answered, but just stating some things you should consider when trying to do a comparison.  If you want to do a general system comparison, you can try PassMark.
https://www.passmark.com/baselines/index.php
 
For audio, you'd want to be sure that something like Replendence LatencyMon doesn't flag any drivers as taking too long to process interrupts, etc.
http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon
 
Best,
Keith
 

Hi. During recording, I use 64 samples (48 kHz). That (IIRC) gives me approx 5.8 ms RTL.
During mixing, I increase it to 2048.
This is with my signature setup below.
All the best.

davec69
I have a Roland Quad Capture (ASIO), running on my older i7 Dell Laptop / Win 10 with Sonar Platinum.  I run my interface and record everything in 96k.
 
(512 Buffer)
Input 7.7ms
Output 10.6ms
Roundtrip is 18.2ms
 
I can lower the buffer to 192, and I start getting the occasional dropout. 
 
(192 Buffer)
Input 7.7ms
Output 3.8ms
Roundtrip is 11.5ms
 

So, I am running on 4 years old I7 CPU with 24GB RAM. Almost same spec but yours is 8.7 msec less. Does the Quad Capture has the official windows 10 driver?

reza

davec69
I have a Roland Quad Capture (ASIO), running on my older i7 Dell Laptop / Win 10 with Sonar Platinum.  I run my interface and record everything in 96k.
 
(512 Buffer)
Input 7.7ms
Output 10.6ms
Roundtrip is 18.2ms
 
I can lower the buffer to 192, and I start getting the occasional dropout. 
 
(192 Buffer)
Input 7.7ms
Output 3.8ms
Roundtrip is 11.5ms
 

So, I am running on 4 years old I7 CPU with 24GB RAM. Almost same spec but yours is 8.7 msec less. Does the Quad Capture has the official windows 10 driver?

I'm using Quad Capture v1.52 Driver.  I do have an uninstaller in "Programs & Features", so I don't think it's the official windows 10 installed driver.  It's probably the Win7/8 driver available on the Roland website here:
 
https://www.roland.com/us/support/by_product/quad-capture/updates_drivers/
 
 

The audio interface is far from the most critical piece of the puzzle. As Keith says above, you have to consider the entire ecosystem. If the best you can get now is 26 ms, so you then go out and buy a premium interface, you might be able to chop 2 ms off that figure. You have to ask yourself if that's worth $1-2K or more.
 
BTW, my buffers stay at 2048 and I almost never change them.