Hey everyone,
Just a quick technical question.  I am planning on doing a massive studio upgrade soon and I'm having trouble deciding on what to do about my studio PC.  I am thinking about spending a smaller amount to upgrade my current desktop to 16Gb, Windows 7 64 bit and getting Sonar Platinum instead of buying an entirely new machine. The CPU is an i5 760 2.8 Ghz processor which is my main source of contention about the upgrade.  I tend to use a lot of samples in my projects and would like to be able to load up several instances of Omnisphere and PLAY without problems.  I've checked the system reqs for Platinum and it looks like I would be able to run it but I'm not exactly sure how well.  It would certainly be a waste of resources to only be able to run the DAW and not anything else.  :p
 
Can anyone shed some light on if this setup would be practical? 

Your post is a bit confusing because you don't say what your current system specs are (other than the i5-760 cpu).
 
It sounds like you're saying you want to upgrade to Win 7-64 bit, 16GB of ram, and Sonar Platinum, is that correct?
 
16GB of ram will definitely help, but I doubt it will get you to where you can run multiple instances of Omnisphere.  Not on your current cpu, and not without using freeze a lot.  I honestly don't know if upping it to 32GB of ram would make a significant difference.
 
I can see why you'd want to skip Win 10, but why go to Win 7?  Go to the better optimized Win 8.1 and use classic shell (which gets rid of the "metro" look so it looks like Win 7).  Or are you saying you're already on Win 7 and don't want to spend more on the O.S.?
 
Installing one or two SSDs would help make things zippier/load faster, but here again your cpu will probably still be the bottleneck.

Thanks for the reply!
My current audio pc is a different machine all together that's even older but only by about 3 years.  i5 (i forget what) at 2.66ghz, Win XP with the max of 4GB Ram and Sonar 8.  With it I can run everything I want to it just takes a long time to complete a project due to the constant need to freeze the vst's down so i can work on other things. Right now I can only run about 2 instances of PLAY or 2 Instances of Omnisphere at a time with only a few problems.  Synths that are not sample based are easier to get a solid 10 instances or more.  
 
I have another desktop (The one described above) that i'm thinking of giving an upgrade to and re-purposing it into being my audio pc.  The only thing is the processor is also fairly dated (the i5 760) so i wasn't sure if upgrading it was going to be worth it.   If it looks like it will be the same PC with more RAM and not much of a performance upgrade then I will plan on buying a new machine.  This was kind of a last minute consideration to get some money saved.  
 
Thanks for the input!
 
 

Ryan,
Check out Dave's (Bitflipper) post before doing your upgrades. 
I think this could  help you out..
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Another-good-video-for-beginners-m3370512.aspx