Ableton Forum

I have a live session that works fine on my desktop computer (Intel Core2 Quad 2.4 Ghz w/ 3.25 GB RAM) but is very glitchy and CPU heavy on my laptop, which is only about 6 months old and supposed to be way more powerful (Intel Core i7 @2.67 w/ 8 GB RAM). I'm using the same soundcard on both (RME Fireface UC). Any ideas why this might be?

Strange.. might be worthwhile running the Live Performance test that is posted (somewhere) on this forum and comparing their performance using that set?

Some strange USB compatibility issue aside, the only reasonable factor would be if you were maxing out the I/O of the drive in your laptop, which is probably a component that will be slower than your desktop machine.. but even then I wouldn't envisage that affecting the CPU too much

I just ran that performance test. It was at 25% on my desktop and 57% on the laptop....so weird. I was under the impression that the i7 would blow my desktop CPU out of the water. I have no idea why this is happening.

Me too! I know there are desktop and laptop variants of the i7 but for what it's worth my friend has an i7 iMac and it is more than 3x faster in the performance test than my 2.8Ghz Core2 iMac.

What about some kind of throttling/underclocking on the CPU in the laptop? This type of stuff is quite common by default on Windows machines to maximise battery life..

Similarly, I'm running an i7-860 on my desktop and an i7-720m on my laptop, and the laptop consistently runs 15-20% on my laptop than my desktop

Is there really such a huge difference between the two as to warrant that much of a performance difference?

I'm running Windows 7 on a Macbook pro...could Bootcamp be the issue?

have you got a mac version of live and if so, have you tried running the session from the osx partition for comparison?

Some laptop hard drives also suck.

That might be a good point about the hard drive...at least it's the only thing I can think of that makes sense.

zeropoint: I can't run this session on OSX because all the plugins I use are VSTs.

Smellhound wrote:That might be a good point about the hard drive...at least it's the only thing I can think of that makes sense.

zeropoint: I can't run this session on OSX because all the plugins I use are VSTs.

Live for OSX DOES support VSTs, but just not Windows-only VSTs. It's just that many VSTs require Windows-specific libraries, but if your VSTs are cross-platform, they will work on OSX as well.

...or else just run the live 8 performance test on both machines off the same external hard drive.....first under windows on the mbp then under osx. i experienced the same dismay when i first upgraded to a santa rosa intel chip from a powerbook. faulty speedstepping on the santa rosa chip was the culprit then as it was for many users at the time. turned out that the 2.4ghz chip was having it's clock locked for all apps even under load at 1.2ghz. Not that this might be related to your problem but my troubleshooting route would be:

Disk
OS
CPU

I don't know what the equivalent is to activity monitor under windows but boot it up under osx when running the performance test and check which processes are running. you may find that some weird background system process is hogging your cpu. this too has been found to be the cause in the past....

good luck

good tips...I'll report what I find. thanks!

All desktop i7's are quad "physical" core - however only 3 out of the available 10 mobile i7's are quad "physical" core with the others being only dual "physical" core. Ableton Live does not support hyperthreading(yet?)so the extra "virtual" cores are redundant in both the laptop and desktop.
I suspect you have one of these dual core i7's in your laptop which is why you get different cpu hits with the same set.

front side bus speeds the same?

Not sure if this has been considered yet, but perhaps power management settings are making it run at a reduced capacity?