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Wow, just finished upgrading to Win7 Pro 64bit and adding 8 gig of RAM to my PCAudioLabs 965 i7 Sequoia 11 beast . Holy Slam Man, does this thing blaze now! Night and day from XP Pro.
Custom built and optimized PC's on this OS are incredible. I highly recommend what I got.

Doing a test I come in at 7.5 out of 7.8 for processing but one thing I'm wondering about is my video is a low number ( 2.8) I'm used to the Mac so I'm not sure if I should upgrade my video card this and if that actually makes a difference?

I've optimized and removed all but the last few display settings (huge performace boost).However, Do better video cards improve audio performance? I'm guessing not because I can't imagine this getting better.I can however imagine the visual to be a bit sharper but I would still keep the setting to enhance visual disabled.

thoughts?

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TheJackAttack Fri, 04/08/2011 - 13:00

Are you speaking about the Windows Experience evaluation? Ignore it. Unless you are going to start processing HD video that number is irrelevant. That number is skewed towards gaming and flash web content. If you are going to start HD video production then I'd call up PC Audio Labs and see what they have researched already to be compatible with their tweaks.

TheJackAttack Fri, 04/08/2011 - 13:14

Also, video work and higher end video cards require extra and sometimes extreme cooling so that adds to the noise floor of the box itself. I've been looking at a new laptop for remote work and think I'm going to go with something from PC Audio Labs but I'm at least six months out from purchase so I could easily change my mind by then.

JohnTodd Sat, 04/09/2011 - 08:52

TheJackAttack, post: 368433 wrote: Onboard chips normally share system memory to operate so I always recommend a separate video card preferably with a gig of its own dedicated memory.

I don't disagree at all with what you are saying.

But nowadays RAM is cheap - with many gigs of RAM the sharing seems to be less of an issue. This forum is keen on tweaking PCs to get more out of them. In the mobo BIOS of a DIY PC there is usually a setting for the "sharing window". It goes by different names. I set mine to share up to 1 gig of system RAM, in addition to the dedicated 512 MB RAM the onboard video has for itself.

I've had up to 96 tracks, each with plugins active, and never got above 2/3rds RAM usage on an 8 gig system. Still, more advanced DAW may be different. Thoughts, anyone?