I stumbled onto this one today, and was impressed by how good it was. It addresses the difference between CPU performance and realtime DAW performance.
 
It's pretty basic, so don't expect any big secrets to be revealed. However, the guy is a natural teacher and presents the information in such a clear manner that beginners will have no trouble following along. And based on many of the questions posed on these forums, it's a topic that everyone would benefit from understanding.
 

 

LOL... Ozone 5 used to demonstrate the performance hit... go figure
 
Edit: He makes good points in this. When I purchased this machine years ago, I read a nice article on the 2600K vs the new 990X chips, and one of the "real-world" benchmarks they ran was with SONAR X1. At that time the real-world advantage of 6-cores only proved itself with encryption and video rendering... the rest of the applications tested showed the 2600K had the advantage (and far less power consumption).

Sorry, this should have been posted in Computers, so I'll move it there.

Good watch!  Also good reminder.
 
I switched years ago over to raptor drives, then SSD's when they came down in price.
Haven't had nearly the issues I did before.  System runs MUCH smoother and I can edit on the fly.
With the price of SSD's coming down more, I may switch my temp drives over as well.
I think it would be a good investment.

Fantastic listen, Bit... thanks oh so much...but I'd suggest retitling to Great video on factors influencing DAW performace
 

They should allow you to post this one in a nub section and MAKE them watch it before posting.
I've passed this one along at least a dozen times this week. 
Great stuff!

Great find! Thanks for posting. Very timely for me in my current situation.
 
Sooo...  those of you guys going to SSD's.... are you just putting your OS, SONAR & plug-in files there or are you actually recording to them to? Aren't they limited to a certain number of writes before their end-of-life and they start to fail?

Yes, SSDs can have shelf-life issues. Some use them for the O/S in order to get blazing fast boot times, but if you do that you'll probably want to move your paging device to a conventional hard drive. What SSDs are perfect for is sample libraries.

Some great information for sure.  If I'm understanding it correctly real time performance is the sum of your parts and how they work together correct?  Is it possible to buy a CPU with bad real time performance?  At the start of the video it seems like he is saying that certain CPU's are better for DAW's than others but then never develops that point and goes into talking about how the different components can lock up your cpu instead.   

ryandavismusic
Is it possible to buy a CPU with bad real time performance?  At the start of the video it seems like he is saying that certain CPU's are better for DAW's than others but then never develops that point and goes into talking about how the different components can lock up your cpu instead.   

As long as the CPU is fast enough to perform all its duties within the window dictated by the sample rate and buffer size, then the CPU is fast enough. What he's saying is that the CPU has many other duties that distract it from processing audio, and it's that extra overhead that determines realtime audio performance. Even the world's fastest runner will lose the race if he's required to bake a pie en route.
 
For example, a Pentium III is perfectly capable of playing back a 50-track song in your DAW - but not if you're playing Halo at the same time.
 
None of this addresses your first question, though, "is it possible to buy a CPU with bad real time performance?". I can't think of any CPUs currently being sold that would be incapable of suitable realtime performance. Or any modern CPUs that couldn't be brought to their knees by a bad system configuration.
 
BTW, an easy way to check how well your own CPU is keeping up is SONAR's CPU meter. You may have noticed that it has little or no correlation to the Windows CPU meter. That's because SONAR's meter is measuring how much time was needed to service the audio buffers. When it reads 50%, for example, it means SONAR was able to fill the buffer in half the maximum-allowable time. If your computer didn't have other tasks and could just do audio, you could run it right up to 100% without dropouts. If you get dropouts at 50% it means the CPU is way too busy with other stuff.