Allen And Friends? Performance Tweaks?

[JasonWorrel]

What tips/tweaks do you use to get the most tracks out of your system?

[Allen Hallada]

Hey Jason,
Here are what made the biggest differences in my system.
1.Promise ATA100 TX2 controller card with system drive on Port A, audio on Port B. Making sure that the ribbon cables on the Promise controller were ATA100. Gave me 4 more Aux. Tracks. on DAVEC test.

2.Dumping the Startup Group Items by going into Start/Run/typing msconfig/choosing selective startup, unselecting "Load Startup Group Items", rebooting, checking on don't show this again in pop up window. You can also just go into Startup tab and unselect everything except Systray. Should give you 95-98% resources free on bootup.

3. Setting system to Network Server in My Computer/Properties/Performance/File System

4. Using 512MB of DDR ram PC2100 by Micron
I've heard that the Corsair may even be better for best performance. I've not tried it yet.

5. Using only ATA100 7200 drives from IBM 60GXP series.

7. Tweaking IRQs so that Digi is on its own at IRQ 9 or 10. This really is key!!

8. I really believe that in the T-bird lineup that their are differences in performance between the AXIA, and other cores. XP should all be the same.

9. Setting CPU usage in PTLE to 85%

10. Setting bios to Turbo mode on the newer A7M266 and A7V266E. Need to use Normal mode in some older Asus boards like the A7V and A7V133 series.

11. Defraging hard drives weekly

I'd recommend anyone with the newer VIA motherboards A7V266 or A7V266E using the Promise controllers to download that VIA patch that I put on the DUC. Has improved hard drive performances up to 40% on these chipsets.

Good luck everyone.
Allen [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[gerax]

Allen

I have a few more suggestions on Windows tweakings that I tried on my system and that seem to work; I don't know if you knew them already (I found them in article written by a Tascam software developer, so I think they could be reliable), anyway here they are for the taking, if you dare....

1) Disable Write Behind Caching: Control Panel>System>Performance>Trouble Shooting> Select Last Option.

2) Reduce Read Ahead Optimization:Control Panel>System>Performance>File system>Hard Disk >Decrease the slider to the smaller setting.

3) Reduce Graphic Acceleration (this doesn't seem to have a tremendous effect, so you be the judge).

There are a couple more, but they're a little complicated to explain in a few words, so if you want to know them e-mail me, and i'll post the article; also write if you want to know the reasons of these tweaks.

Hope this helps

L.G. [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[JasonWorrel]

Thanks for the tips.

[da BaSsTaRd!]

formatting my audio drive to 32kb cluster size gave me an extra 5 aux tracks on the davec test.... get partition magic....

[Allen Hallada]

Brian,
I didn't realize that you got that big of a boost. I must have been sleeping. Wow. That is about 10-15% on most high end Athlons. Great info. So can you do that without reformating the entire drive or is a full format required?
Thanks.
Allen [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[gerax]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:<HR> RME Site definitely discourages this. It puts more strain on the CPU. Just use 16 bit Color instead of 24 or 32bits. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Here's the reasons the author of the article says to be the reason of this tweak. I'm not so computer expert to get into the math of this, but I do notice a difference in performance on my system:

When the hard drive is accessing and retriveing data, it is able to grab some "extra" information that it views as sequentially necessary...basically, it figures you will need the next packet of information in addition to the specific data you asked for. This can be helpful if you are running only one application, but in the world of computer audio recording, you constantly need a variety of information from different areas of the disk. If the system is retrieving data thet it thinks you need, but don't, this can slow your system down tremendously definitely .

Maybe you want to give it a try to find out if it really improves performance; as I said above i noticed a difference.

L.G. [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[da BaSsTaRd!]

quote from AH:
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:<HR> That is about 10-15% on most high end Athlons <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

actually, 18% in my case [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:<HR> So can you do that without reformating the entire drive or is a full format required? <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Partition Magic can do it without a total reformat. just make the change and go.

[yavuzj]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:<HR>Originally posted by gerax:
2) Reduce Read Ahead Optimization:Control Panel>System>Performance>File system>Hard Disk >Decrease the slider to the smaller setting.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

RME Site definitely discourages this. It puts more strain on the CPU. Just use 16 bit Color instead of 24 or 32bits.