Like the question says, which version was the least CPU resource hog.
 
I have been a Sonar user since Sonar 3.  The reason I ask, I am considering using Sonar in a Live setting.  Right now my performances have been  primarily in a Church setting.
 
Lately I have been using my lap top to log into the Church's network to have access to the Net and the cloud, for rehearsals.  So my hope is to have my Wifi card turned on and my primary Synth's of choice at the moment are Garritan Authorized Steinway, Lounge Lizard (Unfortunately X3 only), Dimension Pro and maybe Rapture.  At most I would have three of these loaded at the same time.  So far, under X3, my i5 lappy hiccups.  Dropouts, clicks and general all round burps! It's difficult tweaking the laptop at the moment for top performance, especially if my wifi card is on, although I would turn in off when we go live.
 
So, I am trying to use the best version of Sonar, strictly for playing VSTi's for live performance.  This may ultimately turn into playing along to a prerecorded drum/percussion loop and click track for the drummer or whatever.
 
Just to clarify, I have never had any real show stopper issues/glitches with any of the Sonar versions, so we can eliminate this from the discussion.  I seem to recall really liking Versions 3, 6 and 7  What are your opinions on this?
 
Rich

CWPA9 was great.
3 was great.
4.0.2 was and is still great for me. I still use it and it was the only one I had up until X3e.

I tested 4.0.3 (new audio engine ... shoot self in foot), 5, 6, and all were much more CPU needy in my situation and required much higher latency settings to avoid dropouts so I stuck with 4.0.2 until just recently when
I bought X3.

X3 might be close to 4.0.2 but it's hard to compare since it's now 64 bit, and they've refined and fixed the multi core usage etc.
 
 
 

Steve,
I realized in my haste that my question probably wasn't fair since I referenced sonar 3.  Taking the multi-core processors into account I should probably throw S3 out of my list of favorites.  Thanks for your opinion and response.
 
Rich

W

W

It's the wi-fi that's causing the dropouts. Disable that during performances and you'll probably be OK with any version of SONAR. I haven't noticed CPU usage getting worse with progressive versions, which makes sense because the core audio engine itself hasn't changed much since SONAR 4.

For me from 4.0.3 through 6 it was about the same. I didn't look at anything after 6 until X3.
I have no wireless running or installed.
Finished projects that used to play flawlessly at 1.5ms and 2.9ms needed to go to 11ms or above to play.

I had downloaded some free latency test software and found out that the biggest culprit is the network card. I disable the the network and now my X3 is happy as ever. Moral of the story is no network or WIFI during music making with any DAW.

Not the case here. My network never causes any issues.
In fact, when I'm working on my old 4.0.2 rig I'm often enough running 16 ports of MidiOverLan and using 3 Giga Studio satellite machines, running 128+ midi tracks and at 1.5ms latency with never a glitch.
 
 
 

2 things on Laptop that are for sure are Wireless and Battery management. 
Desktops are a different item.