Has anyone upgraded their CPU?

A

astroidmist

New member
Have any of you guys upgraded your CPU?

If so,...

1) How much improvement did you notice?
2) What are your computer's old and new specs?
 
I just upgraded from an amd phenom ii x4 965 to a sandybridge i5 2500k. I have it overclocked to 4.2 GHz and it runs like a beast. No hiccups yet but I can notice that its quicker and snappier on tasks. With my audio programs n stuff works real quick. Id say its a big improvement in my opinion. Ive always stuck with AMD but decided to move to intel for this chip and honestly I wont be going back to AMD. More of a personal preference though.
 
the GHz label on a processor stopped mattering long ago. It all depends on so many other factors and parts in your system. A quad core machine with a lower GHz rating then a higher rated single or dual core one. Will still kick arse over it when it comes to multitasking etc.


Also as I stated it depends on so many other factors. Basicly the weakest link in your computer will determine it's speed.
 
I'm mainly wondering how to deal with certain VSTi's that soak up a lot of CPU, especially when set to polyphonic instead of monophonic. Anything to stop them from breaking up is what I'm after.

I optimised my operating system for DAW use, so I don't need that. If I upgrade the CPU I can upgrade the FSB at the same time I think. So my impression is that it would help, just not sure how much.

Not all of my DAW software is written for multiple cores. The software that is written for multiple cores seems to work better for CPU use, but that program has other issues.

---------- Post added 03-15-2011 at 08:38 AM ---------- Previous post was 03-14-2011 at 07:04 PM ----------

Wow I just found out last night how to lower the CPU drain caused by one of my main VSTi's! I just had to turn down the number of supersaw unison voices and it stopped glitching. Also I read that I can increase the soundcard buffer to lower CPU drain.

Now if I can just get the other program (Energy XT, with some loops) to cooperate I won't even need a new CPU!
 
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The most important thing to reduce latency is the FSB speed, if you do everything in the box, this won't matter as such.

If you use a lot of soft synths you will notice a difference with a faster CPU, with the newer cores as someone pointed out it doesn't matter about Ghz as these processors can do a lot more cycles due to their large multipliers, but I assume you are still on the old intel sockets, and since you state you only want to upgrade the processor, that means you are stuck with the socket you have, a lot of people round here recommend the Q6600, I do too. I don't have any recommendations for an AMD socket.

But back to your original question, you will definitely see a difference with upgrading the CPU, imo this is the most important part of the machine (even more so with production work)
 
Hey thanks a lot DuffData and others. Those are interesting points. I might still do it sometime, but right now I'm thinking I don't need to upgrade the CPU if I'm just careful with the presets I make in my VSTi's. I'm a bit reluctant to install a new CPU also because I'm afraid I'd mess up and destroy it or the motherboard.

I have a feeling the Energy XT issue is a design flaw that could get fixed in the next update whenever that is.

The only other reason for a CPU upgrade would be to speed up my backup archive speeds using 7-zip. But it's all good; i just take a break and eat some food while it's compressing files. My c: partition backups are actually faster than my 7-zip file backups. But I did learn to lower the compression settings in 7-zip to speed things up a little bit.

I wish I could add more RAM, but it sounds like I'm topped out at 3 GB already (Windows XP SP3 32-bit limit) and the most I would get (if I'm lucky with the hardware influence) is 512 MB from a 2 GM DRAM install. I still might do it though, so I can set my audio editor's cache to a 512 MB RAM disk. I tried it once with Cool Edit 2000 and it worked great! But I really need the RAM to be used as normally. And I'd sure be bummed if I bought the RAM and couldn't actually use it. (Which is possible, apparently).

Anyways thanks for reading this. Everyone's input and perspective is helpful.
 
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