Anyone got any tips/tricks they'd like to share on how to get the best performance for audio on a Windows 7 based DAW?

Or is there a site similar to TweakXP.com? I've searched, but found nothing.

Many thanks...

You may check this page:
Optimising your PC for audio on Windows 7 .: Focusrite Answerbase

Hey RockTech,

THanks for the link.
I was going to ask the very same thing.


Michael

Its the same as Vista Optimization page minus a couple tweaks not needed in Win7

Bumping this with a big thanks for the link.

Samplitude/Sequoia, RME 9652, UAD1,2.

All of my systems are W7 (4 are 32bit, 1 is 64bit) and all are stock. Seriously. W7 is great!

I do change from Aero to classic theme (right click the desk top and choose Personal) when I have video running inside the DAW, sometime...

I can't believe Win 7 doesn't come with High performance mode enabled. I had to do that myself, and it made this computer crushingly fast compared to what it was before I made some changes.

How did you enable High performance mode? Recently swapped from Mac to PC so I'm a bit of a NOOB

It's one of the options under power settings.

Thank you!!!

Hi, just a quick enquiry, re latency.

running win7 (x64, 8gig RAM, on native VHD), and, after disabling everything (devices and services, aggresively), latency (reported by DPC Latency Checker) is as low as 100µs, especially after setting max with TimerResolution tool (unable to modify HPET, no BIOS option)

I wondered how this compares, and if I should see a significant reduction using an SSD.

Finally, I wondered what impact anyone was noticing when disabling certain devices.

I have an 'HD-ready' build. but no HD devices! I have 2 graphics devices (Intel and NVID, disabling Intel cause blank screen) but disabling either yields negative latency results (>1000). Similarly, impact on performance is neglible at best, disabling devices and stopping services - how does this compare with your results?

Saw reports that "HPED BIOS tweak" along can yield latency < 10... Would love to imagine this is an achievable benchmark...

Thanks!

Jonny
(Dell XPS l402x)

http://i.imgur.com/EUQjWdV.png (no IMG'ing allowed yet)

The DPC you can achieve depends a lot on the mainboard. With a P55 chipset based system from 2009 I could achieve a constant 4µs, with current boards this is harder, if not impossible. But such low DPCs are not required. Anything hovering below 100µs is fine, as long as there are no peaks in between which rise above 500-1000µs (it depends on your buffer size how long the DPC peak can be without affecting audio).

This is a great thread (one of many .

I wondered if there were any tweaks recommended here that are

- not relevant for DAW,
- no longer necessary / myths
or
- advised against

Drowning in VSTs

Those are tweaks for gaming, with the focus on graphics performance. very different beast, and I already see tweaks suggested I would NOT do for audio.
Stick to suggestions from NI, Steinberg and Focusrite and you'll be fine. Of course there can be done more but I will not go into that.

If you have a Gigabyte board and Intel Processor, especially if it's a couple years old, and have DPC latency issues (red peaks random dpc spikes); try disabling CPU EIST in the BIOS. This is the only thing that worked for me and it brought the DPC down from spiking up to 3k every couple seconds and audio dropping out an insane number of times to a very stable and constant DPC in the 100-200 range.

Multimedia Class Scheduler service (MMCSS) enables multimedia applications to ensure that their time-sensitive processing receives prioritized access to CPU resources.

Multimedia Class Scheduler Service (Windows)

This article is about improving the overall sound quality and the timing of recording on Windows based PCs by changing IRQ and audio task priorities in the system registry. It applies to Windows Vista, 7 and 8.

Micha?Kaszczyszyn.com

Disabling Windows 7 services. I set to safe mode.

http://www.blackviper.com/service-co...onfigurations/

Un-parking i7 cores

Back up registry before any tweak!

- Go to Regedit
- Select Edit > Find... and find this key: " 0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583 "
- Within this key, there is a value called: " ValueMax " This value represents the % number of cores the system will park
- Change the value of " ValueMax" to 0 so that, it matches " ValueMin "
- You will have to find the key a few times and repeat the process for each time it is found - the number of instances will depend on the number of power profiles in your system. To do this go back up to Edit > Find Next. (I had 3 instances of this key in my registry.)
- Do a full shutdown and power-off and cold-re-start.