Possibly time to upgrade my PC. Spec advice please!

[SteveR]

Looks like it might be time to plan a PC replacement. I ran into stuttering issues on a pop instrumental I just finished. (DAW: Cubase Pro 12). I used a few nice ear-candy virtual synths, that maybe used a fair amount of processing, and I used a few instances of Baby Audio’s Crystalline Reverb. Whether that’s relevant, I don’t know. I also side-chained a compressor to the kick track to get that pumping EDM bass. I never had issues to date, including working on orchestrals with large BBC SO library, but whatever I did on my most recent track, caused audio stuttering/dropouts on the main out (the audio cut off and on through my monitors) when things got busy. I managed to work around it by committing some of the tracks to audio through bounce down. Not ideal though. I only had 22 tracks total, 5 or 6 of which were fancy synths or synth basses. Not that many, I would have thought. The rest were Drums, guitar tracks (audio), audio effects, such as risers, and some vocal and guitar samples, again audio. I did use two sampler tracks as well, to mangle and reverse some of my own samples. Maybe the sampler tracks are heavy on PC too? I’m really not sure what the cause was but given that my PC is now 7 years old, it could be time to modernize.

Having said the above, I ran Task Manager and monitored the Processor performance and it wasn’t spiking any of the cores during these episodes. In fact it didn’t appear to be pushing them hard at all. I built my own PC 7 years ago, running Windows 10. It has an 8 Core 32.GHz AMD processor and 32Gb RAM. The graphics, for what it’s worth, is a Radeon unit with 8Gb. This PC was originally built for gaming but became my home studio machine about 18mo ago. It only has a 250Gb SSD (SSD was a new thing, so was quite expensive back then). I use the SSD only for the OS. My DAW (Cubase Pro 12) and other software is installed on a separate 2Tb SATA drive. I have an additional 2Tb SATA for storage. Possibly the issue I encountered could be to do with data transfer speed. I’m just surmising. Or could it be that I peaked my stereo out? My meters never showed a peak above -5dB though. Just throwing it all out there in case someone recognizes a problem.

If I do go ahead and build a new studio PC, or buy one from a computer store, what should I be aiming for in modern day computer technology? I’m happy to go a little OTT in the interest of future proofing. My last two PC’s have served me well for 7-8 years each.

Any thoughts on the above appreciated.

[Telefunkin]

Cubase works in mysterious ways . I occasionally get similar things when it seems there's no reason for a project to be any more demanding than others that have no issues. It could be background tasks like disk backup. One thing I've noticed is that having lots of windows open with demanding graphics affects how well (or badly) Cubase performs (but that might just be my 8 yr old Shuttle PC with the graphics on the motherboard and no space for a dedicated card). Also, plugins like Ozone can be heavy on cpu. If I close all displays except the main track window it sometimes buys me a bit more performance. Other than that, getting rid of any unused plugins, disabling or deleting any unused tracks, freezing tracks, or rendering to audio then deleting the midi track - all help. However, like you, I expect it won't be long before I'll be looking for a better machine.

[cosmicdolphin]

Sounds like your machine should be pretty capable still , maybe the glitches and dropouts are plugin related which can happen.

Have you ran tests for DPC latency ( resplendance software make a free checker ) as it can be stuff like nic drivers that cause this type of thing.

[SteveR]

Gentlemen, thank you for your replies. Sorry it took me a while to get back. I will do some geeking around and see if I can narrow down the culprit(s). It was only one track that I finished last week which caused these never before experienced hiccups. It seems that my PC should have the grunt to handle this stuff.