Laptop setup - CPU troubles

[mridlen]

I just got my new laptop, and my dropbox synced over, so this means Buzz time on the laptop.

However I had the strangest problem... although I had my ASIO soundcard plugged in, and plenty of CPU to spare, Buzz was making lots of scratching noises like it was running low on CPU.

If anyone has the same problem, be sure to set your power management to "Best Performance"... UMA Mode will cause you great problems and horrible noise.

Hope this is helpful to someone in the future.

[Tiadiad]

I found a few tricks to make things a little more snappier. Windows by default parks half of your cores, so if you have a six core CPU, Buzz will only utilize 3. I know this is meant as a power saver, and ideally those cores will become unparked under a heavy load, but when I pulled up the Resource Manager and overloaded Buzz, it showed that those cores stayed parked... Most of the processing was done by CPU1 only.There is an easy way to unpark them, can't remember exactly how. And also, set your processes to background services, or something like that. Hope this helps a little.

[UNZ]

if the cores stay parked it probably means that its faster to turbo-boost 3 threads than use more. or that it simply doesn't need more cores, or that things can't be threaded further. sorry but the os/buzz are probably smarter than you when trying to figure out what the optimal core usage is i wouldn't worry too much. "power saver" usually limits the max cpu freq so yeah THAT might be an issue.

[Tiadiad]

Oh yes it does need cores. I'm going over 100% on every project, so yeah...I need more cores. And no matter what I use or how much of it, those cores stayed parked. I unparked them manually but yes, I will confess, it didn't make much of a difference. Still, in the Resourse manager under the heaviest loads CPU 1 is doing most of the work. After I unparked everything, all the cores started to react (before, half of them were always grayed out and CPU 1 was overloaded). All my bullshit aside, I'd really appreciate if you could help me utilize everything well, I'm tired of listening to my computer having seizures.

[Joachip]

Stuttering can also be sound card related ... i'm thinking USB trouble.

Do all songs stutter the same amount, or do some songs cause more trouble than others?

[UNZ]

All my bullshit aside, I'd really appreciate if you could help me utilize everything well, I'm tired of listening to my computer having seizures.

are you sure multithreading is even enabled in your buzz ?

[Tiadiad]

It's on. I can still get a lot in with it, but there always comes a point when the crackling starts and everything slows down to a crawl. I usually just work on instruments in groups and unplug whole chains to save CPU, when it comes down to mixing the whole thing...it's tough, just hope for the best. Record, listen, remix, record, listen, remix, record, listen, cyanide. I just wonder if things would go smoother if the workload was distributed properly.
I don't want to come off as a jerk, Buzz is hands down one of the best things for sound design, electronic music, etc. The chains you can build in it could benefit any genre really. So once again, I'll stop my whining.

[UNZ]

then there's still the possibility that your CPU is just not fast enough
(or that you're suffering from denormals....)
you can also try increase the latency for a bit more juice.