What does Sonar X2 need/use more of, RAM or CPU power?

Hey All,

So this is an age old question, but I'd like some feedback from you guys based on your experience.

I've felt for a long time (more than 3 years) that my system was pretty beefy.  Seemed to fly on Sonar 8. But lately, I'm hitting the ceiling faster and more often than before.  More plugins, more effects,... whatever the reason, I'm thinking of upgrading a bit now.  Is it just me, or does Sonar X2 tax the system more? Overclocking is something I don't like to do too much; it makes me very nervous.

Right now I'm at 12GB RAM, my MB can handle up to 24.  But I'm beginning to think the issue is my old i7 chip.  

Which upgrade does X2 benefit most from.. a RAM upgrade to 24GB (fairly inexpensive upgrade), or a CPU upgrade (expensive upgrade esp when considering a motherboard-maxing i7 990x)?  If the answer is CPU, then do I even bother with upgrading my RAM?

I'm trying to avoid a new motherboard.  I currently have the ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 LGA 1366.

Any thoughts and/or advice?

Wow. It would be interesting to know how many hundreds of tracks and plugins you're running simultaneously to jam your PC. An upgrade that would signifigantly improve the performance should be quite radical, IMO. A giga more juice in the processor or a few gigas more RAM does not improve the perfomance very many %, I guess. Well, I'm not really aware of how much more actual processing power the CPU's offer when you go up from one like yours.

Whether you're munching more CPU or more RAM can be seen in the task manager. It depends on what kind of plugins and projects you are running. It may well be you never use more than half of the RAM you've installed.

Without knowing about your projects, I'd be looking first in the settings and drivers to find the cause of slowness.

@Beeej21

Please elaborate on what you mean by 'hitting the ceiling'.  If you mean things just running slower, like loading, that's one thing.  Latency is another.

An i7 CPU should be plenty fast enough for Sonar, and 12GB of memory should be enough as well.  Should you decide to add additional memory, that is a pretty cheap upgrade that would give you more room for holding things in memory, but would not affect anything like initial project loading.

Perhaps you could go through the disk cleanup process and get rid of any temporary files and all of that stuff, and perhaps a defrag (not sure if you are supposed to do those on a solid-state drive).  

Also, if your disk rotation is 5400 RPM, you might consider upgrading to either one that spins at 7,200 or perhaps get a solid-state drive.

And, if your sample libraries live on the same drive your programs do, that can slow things down too, so if this is your situation, consider adding an additional drive and then move your projects folder and your sample libraries to that additional drive.  

If you are running the base X2, then I recommend you install the X2a update - PLEASE NOTE that you should first bring Windows 7 up to current maintenance levels, as a minimum of SP1 is required for X2a to install.

Bob Bone

Thanks All, for your replies and feedback.

So, this is what I mean by "hitting the ceiling" in my projects.  I don't mind waiting 5+ minutes for a project to load up.. I too have various EWQL PLAY plugins and certain Wave and IK Multimedia plugins are super taxing to load and run.  What does bother me tremendously is that after a certain point, my CPU usage monitor in X2 shows the first core slamming up into the red area.  What's even worse, is that upon playback the time indicator struggles to make it through the project.  I get crackling, skipped sections.. awful playback.

Even if I bounce to tracks, using 100% wave files in a project, I can hit that ceiling if I get into the 15 to 25 track projects.  I use busses and subs extensively to share common reverbs, compressions, etc, etc.  Still very saddening to have to deal with this.

I often upgrade my Windows 7 updates.  I'm never more than a month behind on those.  I make Acronis Disk Images often and will load a new fresh image before starting larger projects.  I am on X2a.  My OS is super duper clean with no extras running in the service tray or background.. ever.  I run a clean disk and defrag each time before I save a new disk image.  I make a new image whenever I do a OS update, Sonar patch, even when I install new plugins; and I always load the orig image first, then make my changes and updates before making a new image.

My OS harddrive is all by itself on a Velociraptor 10K RPM HDD.  Blazing fast, clean and stable.  It houses only my OS and program files, nothing more. All my VST and plugins are on a striped RAID HDD set all to themselves.  That drive is JUST for plugins.  My projects are all yet on another striped RAID HDD setup, and that physical setup is JUST for my projects.  My striped RAIDS are blazingly fast.  I back them up often however just in case.

I've built my setup at an optimal setting for Sonar to live happily, but somehow it seems to want more RAM or CPU very quickly. 

My sound studio workstation is ONLY ever used for music production, nothing more... not even surfing the web.  Aside from Sonar, I will occasionally run other audio programs like Melodyne, Masterwriter, Maschine, CD Architect, SoundForge... but it's 90% only ever Sonar X2. And when I'm running Sonar, it's ONLY Sonar and plugins within X2.

I am often saddened when I see how quickly that first core runs into the red area.. but the other cores are all still sleeping.

wow, that's a lot of hard drives and everything spread a little don't you think?
synchronizing hard drives for data transfer(because that's what is indeed going on) is taken for granted a lot more than we think.
have you thought about keeping you OS, sonar, VST all on the same disk ?

y OS harddrive is all by itself on a Velociraptor 10K RPM HDD.  Blazing fast, clean and stable.  It houses only my OS and program files, nothing more. All my VST and plugins

If he only has his OS and Sonar program on his Velociraptor (the Velociraptor has up to 120/120MB/s read/write) I dont this his bottleneck would be the Velociraptor. 


I would have checked the core balance, as "tomixornot" are saying. 

If anyone has a problem with Core 1 maxing out, there was a thread about it in October of 2011.
Pay attention to Post #5, as how to change settings in Power Options.
Only after I did this that my cores are more evenly spread out now. 

Basically it emphasizes the point that we should set
. Minimum Processor State: change to 100%
. Maximum Processor State: change to 100%.
 
The registry edit never did anything for me as well for others.

http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=2409875

dan le

Something else to look into with the i7 is try disabling Speed Step in the BIOS. I had a similar issue with core one maxing out. It got worse after I disabled core parking. Anyway, killing Speed Step (CPUEIST is how it may show) evened things out for me a lot.

Core Parking: http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=1861804

As for Speed Step, it depends on your Mobo manufacturer. I see you have an Asus, so it should be in the BIOS. Some boards don't allow that option (Dells, HP, etc). 

** it seems as though I made a mistake in terminology earlier, and confused parking with unparking** 
This is how my post SHOULD have read:

So I looked into the parked cores in the OS and SpeedStep settings in the BIOS.  It seems I did already unpark my cores earlier when trying to even-out the cores' processing load in Sonar.  My SpeedStep was enabled all along.

I parked my cores and disabled SpeedStep.  My results were worse.  I tried mixing and matching between the unparking and the SpeedStep.  It seems that unparking my cores is a must for me.  The SpeedStep thing didn't seem to net consistent results.. so just I left it enabled since the majority of the time it made a slight difference for the better.

Thanks again emwhy for the info.

I'm guessing the project is in 24/96K?
Try doing it in standard 16/44.1.
If that helps, try one at 24/48
projects will get titanic In size fast at higher bit rates..
It eventually has to bounce to 16/44.1 anyway to burn to cd.