Ableton Forum

Just out of curiousity, what are the windows users 'actual' CPU usage. i.e. looking in task manager and looking at the Live4xxx.exe

I get 20% IN Live, however, the actual program is taking almost 70% in taskmanager...

aleeann wrote:

aleeann wrote:1) 45%
2) Compaq Presario R4000
3) WinXP Home
4) AMD64 4000+
5) 2gb ram
6) Edirol UA-25
7) 5400rpm

With fingers crossed (Updated numbers):

1) 20%
2) Compaq Presario R4000
3) WinXP Home
4) AMD64 4000+
5) 2gb ram
6) Edirol UA-25
7) 5400rpm

nice job!! how'd u fix it?

aleeann wrote:

aleeann wrote:1) 45%
2) Compaq Presario R4000
3) WinXP Home
4) AMD64 4000+
5) 2gb ram
6) Edirol UA-25
7) 5400rpm

With fingers crossed (Updated numbers):

1) 20%
2) Compaq Presario R4000
3) WinXP Home
4) AMD64 4000+
5) 2gb ram
6) Edirol UA-25
7) 5400rpm

Ended up taking back my R4000 and pickin gup one of those small VAIO laptops (the 13 inch wide screen).. it's got a 1.7 centrino, so i'll run some benchmarks when i get done.. sure it won't be as good as the R4000.. but i was getting blue screen of death this morning and stuck in boot cycles.. it was deffinatly a ram issue, not sure what though!

Fingers wrote:

AJS Music wrote:How did your 500MHz PB perform?

Pretty much the same. The meter went straight to some astronomical number and the speakers made a kind of crunching noise with the occasional buzz. I stopped trying pretty quickly.

Thanks Fingers - it's good to know this was not an abnormal occurence on this machine. Can't wait to upgrade - but am presently saving my money and waiting to see what the future holds hardware wise.

well my 867mhz powerbook freaked right out when i hit play with that one. I mean it was idling at 40% b4 i hit play and then it went up to 106% and sounded bloody awful. Should it be this bad ? I think i did everything, i quit all other apps, deselected sound inputs, even with the buffers raised right up to 2400 it was still freaking out! ram 640mb , been noticing cpu issues with live but is this normal or is there something seriously up with my powerbook ?

Done minor things to free up cpu such as turned off dock animatiuon etcc.

any help appreciated, thanks, alan.

alan* wrote: been noticing cpu issues with live but is this normal or is there something seriously up with my powerbook ?

Hard to say, my 800mhz powerbook gives a respectable for it's tiny CPU 82%. Yours in theory should be close to that. Now Apple removed a level 3 backside cache from the earlier version of the powerbook than my model, and the 667 from then is terrible for audio, the 500 from the year before smokes it for CPU performance with things we audio guys use like reverb etc.. so if your powerbook does indeed have a level 3 cache, then theoretically it should perform better than my machine?

22%
Sony VAIO S360P
Centrino 1.7
1 gig of ram
ASIO4ALL

alan* wrote:well my 867mhz powerbook freaked right out when i hit play with that one. I mean it was idling at 40% b4 i hit play and then it went up to 106% and sounded bloody awful. Should it be this bad ? I think i did everything, i quit all other apps, deselected sound inputs, even with the buffers raised right up to 2400 it was still freaking out! ram 640mb , been noticing cpu issues with live but is this normal or is there something seriously up with my powerbook ?

Done minor things to free up cpu such as turned off dock animatiuon etcc.

any help appreciated, thanks, alan.

might seem obvious, but from how you describe it - is your Energy Saver settings set to "Highest" cpu performance? make sure its at "Highest" and not "Automatic"

yes it was set to highest performance, thanks guys,i have no idea what level cache i have, i perhaps should mention i am using an m-audio firewire 410 sound card but i should think that would improve performance would it not ?

alan* wrote:yes it was set to highest performance, thanks guys,i have no idea what level cache i have, i perhaps should mention i am using an m-audio firewire 410 sound card but i should think that would improve performance would it not ?

test without the FWR410 plugged in, using your stock apple onboard soundcard.

if you see large improvements, you know the problem is the FWR410

yes i was thinking to test with just the on board sound card and it performed a lot better 86 % with the minimum samples being around 600.

well it seems the firewire card, while perhaps improving sound quality, drastically limits performance ? which is a shame, i didnt realize this would be the case, do all external sound cards do this ?

Machinesworking wrote:

alan* wrote: been noticing cpu issues with live but is this normal or is there something seriously up with my powerbook ?

Hard to say, my 800mhz powerbook gives a respectable for it's tiny CPU 82%. Yours in theory should be close to that. Now Apple removed a level 3 backside cache from the earlier version of the powerbook than my model, and the 667 from then is terrible for audio, the 500 from the year before smokes it for CPU performance with things we audio guys use like reverb etc.. so if your powerbook does indeed have a level 3 cache, then theoretically it should perform better than my machine?

does that mean the 500 performed better than the 667 or worse ? does the 500 perform better than your 800 ?

alan* wrote:does that mean the 500 performed better than the 667 or worse ? does the 500 perform better than your 800 ?

The 500 was better for audio, you could run more reverbs stacked in Logic with the 500 than the 667, which had no level 3 cache. The 800 I have has a level 3 cache, it beat the 500, and shouldn't beat your 867, but if they removed the cache, that would explain your slightly worse score, with a slightly faster processor.

Thing is for most duties the level 3 cache doesn't affect anything, but for things like audio.... from what I understand, in some cases it's not that important either. The G5's have such large system busses that the cache isn't needed from what I hear.

1) 30% Peak - Min 27%
2) Desktop Custom Built
3) Windows XP Pro - Service Pack 1
4) AMD XP2600+ running @ 2.14GHZ & FSB333
5) 768MB (shared 32MB for video) = 736MB DDR 333 PC3200 running @ PC2700 bottlenecked by mobo only supporting PC2700!
6) onboard Vinyl Audio AC97 sound - Driver ASIO4ALL 2.4
7) 7200rpm 8MB Cache Seagate

Note ASIO4ALL users.., You can get more (cpu) juice with v2.0 and even better with 1.8.

ok I've just installed ASIO4ALL 1.8 and the difference is only 1%.

29% Peak - 26% Min

The differnce was much greater in Logic 5.5.1 though..