Cpu Tweaks

[rocman]

Gotta question for you Pro,s at tweakin, Ive seen guys on the duc who have PIII w/512 megs of ram and have only 12 to 13 tracks per Dave c test while others have basically the same sytem and can get many more tracks w/out any problems. My question is what exactly are you guys doing to get those extra tracks, I have Intel810 PIII 500mgz 512ram 20 gig for OS 30 gig for audio and I only get 12 tracks. Do I need to chg my mother board to up the track count. I dont know much about irq settings and all that, but any info would be greatly appreciated. [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[QuikDraw]

I don't know what you're reading, but 12 tracks is about all you can expect from a PIII 500. I only got 13 tracks from my PIII 650. I follow the PT Performance thread pretty closely and I can't remember ever seeing a 500MHz class Intel machine getting any better than 11 or 12 tracks on the DaveC test.

Your system is doing just fine. Don't worry about it. If you want better performance you'll have to get a faster machine.

Mike

[JMS40]

Hi rocman-
Your numbers look reasonable for that processor.

I have a P3 800 EB OC'd to (roughly)900, 384mb ram.
I get 19 tracks on the DaveC test.

Here are what I consider to be the most important "tweaks" with my system:

Used only for audio applications... 95% PT. Because of this minimalist approach, this is the most troublefree Win 98 machine I've ever used. (PT hasn't crashed my OS in over a year, and that was RAM related.)

All current BIOS and drivers.

I used IEradicator to remove all related aspects of Internet Explorer from Win98SE.
Makes for a very lean OS.

Nothing but Explorer and Systray running while using PT.

001 is sitting alone on IRQ 9.

ACPI power management is disabled in BIOS along with all unneeded ports.

Virtual Memory is disabled in Windows.

Also, I use an external main verb/effects, but I use plenty of EQ plugs and try to group/bus dynamics and effects plugs whenever possible.
Along those lines, I find that I aim for much less processing than I did in the analog world.
It's been a helpful exercise in the old adage "record it right"... knowing there are limits to work within.

Hope this helps.

[Phil O'Keefe]

rocman, performance is the synergistic total of all the components in your system... so someone with the exact same CPU as you may get worse performance due to having a different CPU, or slower (or a single) hard disk. Having said that, I agree that you're doing pretty well for a 500 MHz PIII. I was only able to get about 19 tracks max on a PIII 933 MHz. Some Athlon XP 1800 owners are getting upwards of 24+16 on the davec, but I max out at 24+12... different mobo's, etc.

When you upgrade, I'd highly recommend checking out Allen's excellent "best PT system for under $900" thread for the best performing, "user proven" systems.

[rocman]

Thanx for the response, i already did all of those tweaks. My sys works fine for what Im doing, just wanted to know if i could get more out of it. Plan to upgrade real soon though.