Ableton Forum

Greetings experts,

I welcome all opinion conjecture regarding this situation:

I have live 8.xx running on 2 laptops

1) IBM t-42, pentium M 1gb RAM, 128 mb VRAM, hard drive 4200 rpm, windows xp

2) ASUS kjc52, i5 460, 4gb ram, 1 GB VRAM, hard drive 7200 rpm, windows 7.

Both machines are extremely tweeked for audio performance, and the asus idles as at 15% cpu.

Still, The IBM beats the pants off of the ASUS! Way more virtual voices in synths, never breathes hard, never overheats. The asus performs OK, but struggles and delivers only about 6 simple synth voices plus a few effects, anything more causes crapping out, and daw use turns it into a crop-duster, the fan screaming desperately trying to keep things cool. In hot situations, it over-heats, and I have replaced the heat sync gel on the cpu and gpu.

Funny, right?

What do you think? And thanks

Ed Mann

It's probably a power saving issue

- Make sure Windows is using the High Performance power saving profile
- Go into your BIOS, disable anything regarding C-States, EPU mode
- Disable/Uninstall any Asus Power Saving utilites (Asus Powergear?)
- Ensure BIOS/audio driver is latest version http://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabook ... _Download/

Well, It is possible that the M has a higher clock on it's core CPU and that is buying you a few extra voices. Depending on what you loaded up:
Live -> 2ghz Pentium M core VS live to 1.3ghz i5 core = 2ghz core will appear to have a little more power for that particular VSTi, despite 8 virtual cores or not (because they don't even become taxed).

However, load 8-10 VSTi and see which computer is struggling then. On the Pentium M, after you go past two instances, Live will allocate the 3rd back to core 1, and the 4th to core 2, 5 -> core 1, 6th -> core 2 etc. I'd wager that the M will lose it's ability to cope with the strain before the i5 does.

Because of this way that Live assigns resources, I have been curious about building my next comp using a server mobo and dual cpus so I had a lot of cores available.

And select multi core use in Ableton's preferences

if it gets hot, the i5 will throttle its clock to attempt to cool down (pentium-M does this too). there are some third party tools you can use to see what CPU it's actually running at, something like CPU-Z. my old dell when it started dying would throttle down to 600MHz. that would certainly explain the difference.

disclaimer: i work for intel, but this is just my opinion - i don't even work in mobile.