For the most part my DAW works pretty well, however at times it seems there are hiccups with the display, whether it be aim assist randomly disappearing or that the now time marker will occasionally 'stick' for a split second during playback before shooting ahead to the correct measure. Also, waveform heavy plugins like Melodyne just don't seem to render as smoothly as they should. Plugins like iZotope Neutron or Ozone that use real time spectral analyzers also are quite jumpy in their readouts. Given my specs below, I would think that my processing power is quite sufficient, especially given that my projects aren't that intensive. After running a benchmark test though, my video card by far scored the worst scores. Given that I don't really game, I didn't think it was a big deal, but perhaps upgrading to something newer would help alleviate the problems above? Am I off base or could there also be other factors or other components needing upgraded? Another potential bottleneck is that my motherboard only supports Sata II, so I'm not using my SSD's to their full capability. Would getting a PCIe SATA 3 card improve performance at all?
 
AMD Athlon X4 640 3.0ghz QuadCore
12 GB DDR-3 Ram
2x 256gb SSD & 1x 1tb 7200RPM
512MB Radeon 4300 Video Card
 

You don't mention what OS you're running (I presume Win10). That Radeon card you've got is pretty old (having only 512 MB video RAM can hurt you). I had to replace my Radeon card after updating to Win10. The driver was never stable. I was getting at least one BSOD a day.
 
I'm not into gaming, so I didn't need the latest and greatest master blaster. nVidia makes the chipset; third parties build adapters. I prefer Gigabyte's nVidia adapters, so I picked up a 4 GB GeForce GTX 750 Ti card on Amazon for a little over $100 with the discount and $20 rebate. The drivers are updated at least monthly, and I'm currently having zero issues.
 
http://www.gigabyte.com/p...-page.aspx?pid=5572#kf
 
 

If you go the nVidia route, you only need to install the driver and the PhysX component for a DAW. Skip all the gaming and 3D stuff. It'll only clog things up. Each time you update the driver, you'll need to deselect the (for me) bloatware.
 

+1 to The Maartian.
 
When you install an Nvidia card select Custom Install or whatever it's called and not the Express Install. You want the install that allows you to deselect EVERYTHING but the driver itself. If you don't see choices you can select, stop and go back because you selected the wrong type of install.
 
 

steveo42
+1 to The Maartian.
 
When you install an Nvidia card select Custom Install or whatever it's called and not the Express Install. You want the install that allows you to deselect EVERYTHING but the driver itself. If you don't see choices you can select, stop and go back because you selected the wrong type of install.

Thanks for noting the Custom/Advanced Install. I also installed the PhysX component for hardware acceleration support, but, as Steve notes, it's not required.

TheMaartian
You don't mention what OS you're running (I presume Win10). That Radeon card you've got is pretty old (having only 512 MB video RAM can hurt you). I had to replace my Radeon card after updating to Win10. The driver was never stable. I was getting at least one BSOD a day.
 

My graphics card (HD 5450) is also no longer officially supported for win10; drivers for win10 are only found in the legacy sections of the ATI download pages ...
 
It seems to be working OK (no apparent issues), yet I realized that win10 Pro installed a newer driver (where did that come from?) when forcing #1607 update on me ... I meanwhile reverted back to what ATI lists as their last official driver for the HD5450.
 
So I might have to upgrade sometime in the near future myself ... having had 0% graphic related problems since going for the HD5450 (while I had plenty with a more powerful nVidia) I would want to go for the best and closest replacement of the HD5450 ... which model would that be (PC exclusively used for audio applications, nothing else) ?

Rob[atSound-Rehab]
 
It seems to be working OK (no apparent issues), yet I realized that win10 Pro installed a newer driver (where did that come from?) when forcing #1607 update on me ... I meanwhile reverted back to what ATI lists as their last official driver for the HD5450.
 
So I might have to upgrade sometime in the near future myself ... having had 0% graphic related problems since going for the HD5450 (while I had plenty with a more powerful nVidia) I would want to go for the best and closest replacement of the HD5450 ... which model would that be (PC exclusively used for audio applications, nothing else) ?

You are years away from needing to worry.  The HD5450 with 1GB+ memory is a great video card for a DAW.  (OP's card is way older than yours).  I have two home-built machines and put the HD5450 (2GB) in both because it's proved to be very stable for me.
 
Don't just take my word for it.  Jim Roseberry (studiocat.com) still puts HD5450s in his custom DAW builds (Of course, you can pay extra for a higher-end card).

JonD

Rob[atSound-Rehab]
 
It seems to be working OK (no apparent issues), yet I realized that win10 Pro installed a newer driver (where did that come from?) when forcing #1607 update on me ... I meanwhile reverted back to what ATI lists as their last official driver for the HD5450.
 
So I might have to upgrade sometime in the near future myself ... having had 0% graphic related problems since going for the HD5450 (while I had plenty with a more powerful nVidia) I would want to go for the best and closest replacement of the HD5450 ... which model would that be (PC exclusively used for audio applications, nothing else) ?

You are years away from needing to worry.  The HD5450 with 1GB+ memory is a great video card for a DAW.  (OP's card is way older than yours).  I have two home-built machines and put the HD5450 (2GB) in both because it's proved to be very stable for me.
 
Don't just take my word for it.  Jim Roseberry (studiocat.com) still puts HD5450s in his custom DAW builds (Of course, you can pay extra for a higher-end card).

Thanks for your feedback. Much appreciated!

OK well I upgraded my video card to a Radeon HD 5450 with 2GB RAM. Got it for $10 after rebate so thought it was a pretty inexpensive experiment!
 
Unfortunately though I don't think it solved the problem, as the DAW still feels laggy & unresponsive at times. One example I noticed tonight is that when I start playback, the now time marker freezes initially then will jump almost an entire measure before scrolling normally. I also have the console view docked in the multidock. When I click on the tab containing it, it redraws the window one track at a time. Granted, these are minor inconveniences that don't greatly impact workflow, but where it absolutely comes into play is when comping & working in Melodyne. I need everything running snappy and I'm just not sure where to go. Disk/processor/memory usage seems to be pretty normal...any other things I could look into?

What I would do is load up task manager / resource manager or download Process Hacker here:
http://processhacker.sourceforge.net/
 
Run it while you are doing whatever action causes problems. Run the graphs as well as the lists of processes / services etc and look for anything that might have triggered at the same time you start bogging down.
At this point you are just looking for something that is sucking cycles.  Do you happen to notice your hdisk light on solid when it happens? I had a similar problem a few years ago, hesitations. I thought it was a bad mouse but it turned out to be a sick hdisk. Ask me how I discovered it  :( . Wasn't pleasant...
 
Another thing I would try just for grins is to change your screen resolution to a lower value. So make everything big. If you have no problems at the lower resolution, it *could* indicate your graphics card/cpu isn't keeping up. I really, really, really doubt that though because a lot of us are using either real cheap graphics cards or simply the on board Intel video chip which seem to work fine. Might be worth a try though. DAW work barely makes even a cheap graphics work at all.
 
The key is to capture whatever is causing the slow down and unfortunately that is not going to be easy unless you get lucky and see  xxyyzz.exe kicking off every time you get slowdowns.
 
Just some things to investigate.