Latency in Pro Tools despite my Pcs specs

Donta Black

Donta Black

Active member
Hey FP fam, im sort of in a fix. I just bought and built a new PC with the help of a friend and its pretty powerful. I notice that I still witness latency and that PC has a lot of free RAM not being used. I still get the buffering issue from time to time also. If anyone has any spare time to drop me some advice, id be grateful. I will post a picture of my PC specs and my Pro Tools set up.

I was currently in a project using the Nexus 2 VSTs RTAS with Reason Rewired.

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I would check your hardware buffer first, but it looks pretty low already.

Do you have any look-ahead compressors or limiters on the master or any channel?
 
I don't know man but I would probably start by looking at the Mbox 2 because it's a bit long in the tooth now, I mean it's got to be at least 10 years old right? I mean perhaps the drivers are a little creaky.
 
Donta Black said:
Hey FP fam, im sort of in a fix. I just bought and built a new PC with the help of a friend and its pretty powerful. I notice that I still witness latency and that PC has a lot of free RAM not being used. I still get the buffering issue from time to time also. If anyone has any spare time to drop me some advice, id be grateful. I will post a picture of my PC specs and my Pro Tools set up.

I was currently in a project using the Nexus 2 VSTs RTAS with Reason Rewired.

View attachment 45142View attachment 45143
Click to expand...

You have 12 pretty fast logical CPUs assigned, that helps to keep the latency down. But what your actual latency will be depends on your audio interface and its drivers. It is recommended to use PCI express and DSP acceleration. In Windows you should use Pro Audio/Video as the power option for low latency. This power mode has been designed specifically for audio production. Pro Tools exhausts internally over time on Windows, before a bounce, close Pro Tools, cold boot the audio interface, restart the PC, reset CPU affinity, start Pro Tools and bounce. It is most optimal to skip the bounce.
 
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Ideally you should be rocking a PCIe audio interface in a tower system with PCIe slots rather than using a USB audio interface but of course such cards tend to be a bit of high end overkill with a price to match these days so a lot of cats just rock a USB interface with decent drivers and honestly it's better to have a USB audio interface with decent drivers than a PCIe audio interface with shit drivers even though one protocol is better than the other....now unlike those of us who rock a card you still have your on board audio enabled in BIOS and so you might want to see how that performs in comparison to the Mbox 2.
 
I personally don't think PCIe is all that relevant anymore these days. Yes, it's theoretically faster but good USB interfaces with good drivers get latency down to a few ms, which is completely unnoticeable. Even my humble & somewhat aging Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 setup goes down to 7ms roundtrip (4ms in, 3ms out) and frankly I think it's more than good enough & certainly not something possible for anyone to hear. But yeah, the Mbox 2 is getting a bit long in the tooth - someone suggested the old Digidesign beta drivers as a fix for latency issues. Might be worth checking it out.
 
Thanks fella, first issues was that I didn't install my CPU fan properly causing my CPU to get to hot. And I think your all right about the MBox2, that'll be my next investment, to get a new interface. I appreciate the help greatly. Thanks for the link on the driver @Krushing!
 
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