Ableton Forum

Hello friendly music producers,

I recently purchased the new macbook pro 15 inch. Marvel of a machine that is running ableton like a dream in closed clamshell mode with external monitor.

After my projects get to about 80-100 tracks running simultaneously i switch over to the new windows machine i built which uses a 7940X overclocked CPU all cores at 4.4 GHZ.

After about 130 tracks with multiple tracks having 10+ unit effects chains and also maxed voicing on synths, im still finding a way to hit 80%

I am looking for advice on what steps to take to build the absolute most uncrushable machine possible for ableton to ensure absolutely no clicks or pops and the CPU doesn't ever go over 50%

I'm starting to think that after a certain number of cores and audio tracks ableton just isn't written efficiently enough to process all that data. Could this be true? Have I peaked?

Thank you times a million for any advice!!!

Well even all the cores and threads wont help if you max out just 1 of them and since they are on a track by track basis 100 odd tracks could do that.

Have you opened a CPU monitor to see what is happening when this occurs? see if any cores are maxing out or close to?

Not knowing what kinds of instruments and fx you have loaded up on tracks its hard to say.

jestermgee wrote:Well even all the cores and threads wont help if you max out just 1 of them and since they are on a track by track basis 100 odd tracks could do that.

Have you opened a CPU monitor to see what is happening when this occurs? see if any cores are maxing out or close to?

Not knowing what kinds of instruments and fx you have loaded up on tracks its hard to say.

The cores don't generally go past 40 to 50%

I use select plugins from pretty all the major plugin guys.

If i encounter pops I have switch the DAC audio buffer size from 196 to 256 but i would like to make the machine perform better.

I'm wondering if performance gains could be had from overclocking my RAM.

Just looking for ideas on how to squeeze every last drop of performance out of this machine!

Yeah you are already operating at levels where I would personally be expecting to have issues. 130 tracks loaded with synths and effects is pretty insane. I have no further suggestions.

soundremedy wrote: I am looking for advice on what steps to take to build the absolute most uncrushable machine possible for ableton to ensure absolutely no clicks or pops and the CPU doesn't ever go over 50%

there is no such thing.

you need to understand that there is not a linear relationship between number of cores and processing power. yes, having multiple cores running in parallel increases processing power, but 2 cores does not provide 2 times the processing power, as there are unavoidable overheads involved in splitting work between cores.

have a look at the numbers on this page:

https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/2079

the single core score is about 5200, and the 14 core / 28 thread score is just over 36000 (that is a lot less than 14 x 5200).