Upgrade my Video card? Something else?

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
 
 

+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.
 
 

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) ?

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!

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.

JonD
Dan,
Make sure you install the latest Whql drivers for the HD5450.  Do not install any of the "extra" utilities.  (Check the task manager startup tab to make sure you don't have anything you don't want running in the background).
 
Also, if you have 64-bit double precision turned on, disable it and see what happens.

By extra utilities are you referring to Catalyst Control Center? It looks like they might be doing away with CCC as I also have a new program from AMD called Radeon settings. Can I get rid of CCC, as I thought it was somewhat resource heavy?

Ok so I think I solved most of the problem. Apparently Microsoft felt the need to install a background app for their Groove music service w/out telling me. I happened to notice it was taking up about 23% of the resources so I killed/uninstalled and also purged any other unnecessary processes. That fixed the stuck now time marker and improved the lagginess considerably.
 
However, I still feel like there's much room for improvement. I did a benchmark of my PC and the results were not so hot. Granted I think these benchmark programs are generally tailored more towards gaming PC's but I'm wondering if there are still things I should look into. Specifically, my processor and RAM are scoring quite low despite what I think are pretty decent specs. I'll post the results below and if anything sticks out, I'd definitely appreciate any pointers!
 
http://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/2501728