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440 Forums _ Getting Started _ Powerbook Cpu Performance Problem?

Posted by: earthlinger Sat 7 Jan 2006, 11:35

hi everyone,

I just bought Powerbook 15 1.67 with 2 gb ram and 100 gb 7200 rpm hard disk. I made a simple performance test in my laptop to compare it with my PC DAW. I opened one of my heavy projects in Reason. On powebook cpu meter in Reason is half full in the beginning and when it comes to heavy parts in the song it reaches to 90 percent. Also sometimes you can hear clicks and slowing in tempo. In my Daw same project max peak is around 40-50 percent at CPU meter in Reason. Powerbook uses built-in audio. My DAW uses Yamaha 01x. I'm not sure if the reason of poor performance is built-in audio. I am really worried about the performance. I was planning to use it in my live setup. I'm also planning to buy new sound card for it. However nowadays I'm just making performance tests in my laptop. My DAW has less RAM (1 GB) than powerbook. I will appreciate if anybody have any advice for me?

earth linger

Posted by: earthlinger Sat 7 Jan 2006, 23:26

I really couldn't understand why my brand new Powerbook doesn't support Processor Performance pop-up menu in Energy saving part of system preferences.

Posted by: rickenbacker Sun 8 Jan 2006, 15:35

I've been thinking of buying the exact same computer, so I'm interested to hear your experience. An external soundcard (ie FireWire or via the PB's card slot) would probably help, as would running the song files off an external FW drive (ie have Reason on your PB's hard disk, but all the songs on another).

When you say "heavy projects", how heavy? How many tracks? What plug-ins? Does your PC have dual processors? More info could help make the picture clearer.

Posted by: earthlinger Mon 9 Jan 2006, 04:21

I think I shouldn't behave like a dreamer about latency with built-in audio. As everyone expects, 128 samples with 3 ms latency makes CPU performance much more slower. 256 and 512 solved my problem about CPU. This is my first Mac. I think I was bit of confused at the beginning during trying to learn my setup's capacity for live performance. I liked the stability of my powerbook. (it's been 5 days so far)....If I face any serial problems I will post here rickenbacker...

earthlinger