took 5 mins to load project on PC, what part to upgrade 1st?

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drum infected
Posts: 48
Joined: Mon Jun 06, 2011 11:26 am

took 5 mins to load project on PC, what part to upgrade 1st?

Post by drum infected » Wed Jun 22, 2016 9:10 am

Hello Ableton community,
I couldn't really find a definitive answer for my question searching the forums (with my specs) so I'll try and make this short and sweet.

I built my PC in 2011 I believe, but now my strength isn't so good so I'm going to need assistance (disabled) adding parts to my PC rig so any help is appreciated.

I opened up a project file and it took almost 5 minutes to open up on my PC. On my Macbook was much quicker under a minute. I got the macbook in 2013 (2.3 i7 16gb ram @ 1600mhz) It was also started running sluggish when I added another VST. it looked like I was getting like 12fps when I was playing the song. I had about 3 omnishpere vst tracks and 2 Exhale tracks (A VST for Kontakt) among a handful of other plugins but those are the big cpu heavy ones. I tried freezing all of them but it didn't make much difference.

When I played the project file in ableton, the CPU usage Ableton showed was about 58%. I opened up task manager to see what everything was running, at the same time and the CPU was only at 44% my Memory Ram was @ 7.60GB I put my project files and audio files on a seperate HDD WD 7200rpm drive.

The Question I have is what part should I upgrade first?
RAM? (can upgrade up to 32gb)
CPU? (I Can upgrade to a FX-8370 w/o water cooling)
SDD? (for project files and audio files)
I know it depends on what I want to do, and what I want ableton to run smoothly with a lot of VST usage. I eventually will probably upgrade all 3 when I can afford it.

Here are my specs of my PC:
SSD with Win7 64bit SP1
AMD FX-6200 Six Core Processor
Ram 16gb
Radeon 7850
motherboard - Asrock Fatal1ty 990FX Pro

I know I should just probably upgrade to a new rig perhaps, but so much time has been spent putting the vsts and all the programs to install and such would take a lot of time and money.

Any help is greatly appreciated and any questions please feel free to ask. Thanks for reading this.

contortrix
Posts: 40
Joined: Wed Apr 23, 2014 3:09 pm

Re: took 5 mins to load project on PC, what part to upgrade 1st?

Post by contortrix » Wed Jun 22, 2016 3:31 pm

You have plenty of RAM.
You already have an SSD, which is the most bang-for-the-buck upgrade. Adding another SSD, or upgrading your main one to a bigger size, could help only if you experience issues streaming from disk.
7200RPM HDD should be fine unless you are streaming a ton of tracks from disk.
Your CPU is a bottleneck. A current-gen i3 should beat that CPU easily, especially in single-threaded performance. I would personally switch to an i5 or i7, though that will also mean a mobo upgrade as well. If you want to stick with AMD, definitely look at your upgrade options.

May consult these results for choosing a CPU:
http://www.scanproaudio.info/tag/dawbench/
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Lojik
Posts: 25
Joined: Tue Feb 16, 2016 10:12 am

Re: took 5 mins to load project on PC, what part to upgrade 1st?

Post by Lojik » Wed Jun 22, 2016 3:36 pm

Hmm that sounds like a software issue somewhere rather than a hardware bottleneck - you shouldn't have audio crapping out at 58% CPU usage. What soundcard are you using? Are you using up to date ASIO drivers? What are your buffer settings?

tintala
Posts: 476
Joined: Mon Nov 29, 2010 5:37 pm

Re: took 5 mins to load project on PC, what part to upgrade 1st?

Post by tintala » Thu Jun 23, 2016 1:31 am

Check buffer settings , but ssd really helps boot times...you can also opt out of scanning vst in live.

drum infected
Posts: 48
Joined: Mon Jun 06, 2011 11:26 am

Re: took 5 mins to load project on PC, what part to upgrade 1st?

Post by drum infected » Thu Jun 23, 2016 5:11 am

contortrix wrote:You have plenty of RAM.
You already have an SSD, which is the most bang-for-the-buck upgrade. Adding another SSD, or upgrading your main one to a bigger size, could help only if you experience issues streaming from disk.
7200RPM HDD should be fine unless you are streaming a ton of tracks from disk.
Your CPU is a bottleneck. A current-gen i3 should beat that CPU easily, especially in single-threaded performance. I would personally switch to an i5 or i7, though that will also mean a mobo upgrade as well. If you want to stick with AMD, definitely look at your upgrade options.

May consult these results for choosing a CPU:
http://www.scanproaudio.info/tag/dawbench/
Thanks very much for your reply contortrix and for that great link. So you think it's a hardware bottleneck?I see you advised me to get a new mobo and cpu, and I think that is the best choice by far, but if i wanted to stick with the AMD and not reinstalling everything do you think it would fix the bottleneck issue? Right now I only have a six core CPU installed right now and my mobo can take up to a 8 core. I checked for the best CPU my mobo can take without it being watercooled and it was a AMD-FX-8370. I'm debating to spend money on that 8370 if it will fix the bottleneck issue and then get a new mobo and cpu (intel i7) when I can afford it. I think I'm going to get a fx 9590 and water cool it for now if it will fix the bottleneck issue for me but that's about $300 to do that, but if that will fix it then that will be my next step
Lojik wrote:Hmm that sounds like a software issue somewhere rather than a hardware bottleneck - you shouldn't have audio crapping out at 58% CPU usage. What soundcard are you using? Are you using up to date ASIO drivers? What are your buffer settings?
Thanks for the reply Lojik. You think it's a software issue rather than hardware bottleneck? Yeh that's what I thought too about my audio crappin out and taking forever to open up a project file (this is the first time this has happened although it's a decent size project file) Sorry I didn't mention what Audio interface I have but it's a M-audio Delta 1010 it's a 10in/10out rack. I'm using the latest up to date drivers and I also gave ASIO4ALL a show and that didn't do anything.


I'm trying to figure out if this is a software issue or bottleneck issue since they both were suggested and mentioned by Lojik and controltrix. Any other steps to further this so I can finally solve the issue is appreciated and thanks for the help so far it means a lot.
tintala wrote:Check buffer settings , but ssd really helps boot times...you can also opt out of scanning vst in live.
yes my main drive is SSD and I also tried longer buffer settings even 2048.

jestermgee
Posts: 4500
Joined: Mon Apr 26, 2010 6:38 am

Re: took 5 mins to load project on PC, what part to upgrade 1st?

Post by jestermgee » Tue Jun 28, 2016 12:03 am

Seems excessive that it takes 5 minutes to load.

Omnisphere can be CPU intensive and does have a massive library of sound but no single patch is huge.

When you say you have 7GB of ram being used, how much of that is the Live software using with this problem project? That would give us an idea of how much memory the software is trying to grab.

16GB Ram is plenty as stated but AMD is certainly not a processor I would ever use (nor have ever used) for audio production. Many rears ago it was a point of issue with certain software and I know some programs such as Serato simply don't work with AMD.

With your SSD you currently have is this for just the OS or do you have the Omnisphere library and Kontakt library on that too? If you do then it does not make sense why it should take 5 minutes to load.

Audio dropout is a whole other area but honestly I would not even bother with trying to upgrade components. For production work every 3 odd years you want to look at upgrading to keep up.

If you have not done a proper cleanout on your OS (format/reinstall) then I would highly recommend doing a backup and doing this first. It could simply be over time some shit software and services have started to cause havoc with your system. It is a pain to reinstall everything but it is worth doing every year or 2 just to clean out the rubbish and also ensure you can still load projects after a reinstallation if required. I normally remove the entire OS drive (SSD) and purchase a new drive to reinstall onto so I can still revert back to the old setup should I need to.

drum infected
Posts: 48
Joined: Mon Jun 06, 2011 11:26 am

Re: took 5 mins to load project on PC, what part to upgrade 1st?

Post by drum infected » Tue Jun 28, 2016 7:40 am

jestermgee wrote:Seems excessive that it takes 5 minutes to load.

Omnisphere can be CPU intensive and does have a massive library of sound but no single patch is huge.

When you say you have 7GB of ram being used, how much of that is the Live software using with this problem project? That would give us an idea of how much memory the software is trying to grab.

16GB Ram is plenty as stated but AMD is certainly not a processor I would ever use (nor have ever used) for audio production. Many rears ago it was a point of issue with certain software and I know some programs such as Serato simply don't work with AMD.

With your SSD you currently have is this for just the OS or do you have the Omnisphere library and Kontakt library on that too? If you do then it does not make sense why it should take 5 minutes to load.

Audio dropout is a whole other area but honestly I would not even bother with trying to upgrade components. For production work every 3 odd years you want to look at upgrading to keep up.

If you have not done a proper cleanout on your OS (format/reinstall) then I would highly recommend doing a backup and doing this first. It could simply be over time some shit software and services have started to cause havoc with your system. It is a pain to reinstall everything but it is worth doing every year or 2 just to clean out the rubbish and also ensure you can still load projects after a reinstallation if required. I normally remove the entire OS drive (SSD) and purchase a new drive to reinstall onto so I can still revert back to the old setup should I need to.
Thanks for reading this jesturemgee

I have a update actually. I updated my BIOS to the lastest version and I checked back on the file that took for ever and I didn't get any dropouts or stutter anymore! It did still take about 4 minutes to load though.
16GB Ram is plenty as stated but AMD is certainly not a processor I would ever use (nor have ever used) for audio production. Many rears ago it was a point of issue with certain software and I know some programs such as Serato simply don't work with AMD.
When you say you have 7GB of ram being used, how much of that is the Live software using with this problem project? That would give us an idea of how much memory the software is trying to grab.
Man if I could go back in time I would've just bought a intel CPU, I have no idea where I heard AMD's were good for Music Production but I swore I would've researched something like that. Maybe at the time, because there was no i7's? I don't know maybe my mind just slipped there. smh.

That's how much it said when I looked in my taskmanager. Is there a place for me to see how much ram Live is using?
With your SSD you currently have is this for just the OS or do you have the Omnisphere library and Kontakt library on that too? If you do then it does not make sense why it should take 5 minutes to load.
My Omnisphere library and Kontakt library both are on the HDD drive, only OS is on SSD drive and plugins and Live.
For production work every 3 odd years you want to look at upgrading to keep up.
Yeh, I'm looking at the fastest AMD CPU my board can handle, plus I would need to liquid cool it, but that's not to big of a issue. That would cost $300 or I can upgrade the CPU and MOBO but that would take forever and I think I would need a whole new PC RIG to put it in too so that would cost a lot more than $300. So I'm debating what to do.

login
Posts: 1870
Joined: Sat Jul 16, 2011 12:41 am

Re: took 5 mins to load project on PC, what part to upgrade 1st?

Post by login » Thu Jun 30, 2016 3:49 pm

Right now I would format the PC and make a fresh, clean install to get rid of any software issue.

Then start saving to upgrade to an Intel i7 some time in the future.

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