Reinstall PT 12 from original downloads. (not avid site)

[JoelG]

Yes, but the thread mentions buying a NVMe, but Sandra shows one installed, but not the C:\ drive... I should have read the followup posts more carefully

[Darryl Ramm]

As Joel says memory DIMMs don't look good. They should all be same speed, specs and manufacturer... they should ideally be exactly the same DIMM model/part number, and they should be on the vendor qualified list (VQL) for you motherboard. And with two channels the DIMMs if you did go with different size DIMMs the sizes should be lined up across the channels. I can't recall which order Sandra reports those channels and slots, but you can check on your motherboard.

That VQL *might* be so old that it's not got larger memory support on it, but hopefully it has and you can max out memory, maybe to above what you have now. If not that may need to explore off exact VQL configs, but you should do so with matched components, conservative timings and checking with memory vendors for what they claim works.

But we're also blind to what exact issues you've been having, but memory problems can cause all sorts of hard to reproduce crashes etc. But you typically go to worrying about that after excluding more common plugin or other software related issues. Still I'd address this memory mismatch.

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224GB (NTFS, 4kB) @ Force MP510 (240GB, PCIe2/3x2/NVMe)

I don't understand this, PCIe 2/3 x 2. I would hope the motherboard M.2 slot was PCIe 3 x 4 lane but this looks like it is x 2 lane? And nothing makes any sense with the "10Gbit/s" spec for the M.2 slot that ASUS gives in some data sheets for that mobo, are they trying to say that each PCIe lane is 10 Gbit/sec? But you should double check that, maybe that's configurable in the BIOS. And seemingly you have nothing in the motherboard PCIe slots.

If the M.2 slot is indeed only PCIe 3 x 2 lanes. Then I would get a cheap dumb 4 x PCIe 3 adapter card (what I use: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01I5VABFY) and see what this drive reports in Sandra when the Corsair M.2 is plugged into that adapter in a PCIe 3 slot in the computer.

But the Corsair MP510 in that small capacity will be performance limited by the small controller to NAND chip fan-out. Possibly very limited, it's maybe so embarrassing that Corsair don't seem to be shouting performance numbers about it. And that drive is old now and only 240GB so again I'd be getting a 2TB Samsung 980 Pro or WD Black SN850 and likely just retiring the Corsair SSD or using it for small scratch space, but sample and sessions would all go on the new M.2 card and that would go in the motherboard M.2 slot if I could be sure that it's doing 4 x PCIe3 lanes, otherwise I'd put an adapter card in the PCIe 3 backplane slot. I think you only have one PCIe 3 slot, And if that slot got used by a graphics card then you could use the PCIe 2 slot, but I think that is only a x4 electrical slot so you can only get PCIe 2 x 4 out of that, and can't say use a switch based adapter in the PCIe 2 slot to do link 8 x PCIe 2 aggregation to get you to a 4 x PCIe 3 M/2 slot.

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You will probably be fine with the i7 Intel graphics, especially with the a not super high resolution single display. But are you having graphics performance glitches, slow rendering, Pro Tools CPU spikes/CPU error?

Have you fully optimized the system? Tried everything, including all the BIOS and power management settings. Done plugin troubleshooting etc.?

I agree with Joel that I'd probably be on Windows 10, but in my case that would be with a more recent version of Pro Tools, there has been too many nice additions through to Studio. But only you know if that is worth the cost to you.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by JoelG

Yes, but the thread mentions buying a NVMe, but Sandra shows one installed, but not the C:\ drive... I should have read the followup posts more carefully

Ian is describing moving that current NVMe drive out and replacing it with a new one and using the new one as a C: drive... that is the whole point of this thread