So I have enough vst's to put a track together on the new computer. I decided to throw on a few of the bigger CPU hoggers and see how the AMD Vision A8 quad core would do. When I start the track with a few things on there CPU is at 45%. Funny thing is, the more vst's and fx I throw on there, the CPU goes DOWN. When it was all said and done CPU was at 25 %.
So, is this normal?
Is this the other cores kicking in as the load gets greater?
Mind you, I'm not complaining. It was great. Just wondering if this is normal.

I think things in BIOS affect that a lot.

I turned off dynamic overclocking and core parking to get x64 W7 run more smoothly from start.

At the time I tested some firewire interfaces and cpu went down 30% doing just that. I left the idea of firewire interface after testing anyway - but it says a little bit how it works.

And another thing I'm thinking of, with an experience in XP, is to turn off hyperthreading(HT). So instead of showing 8 logical cores you will get 4 in W7 i7 machine like I have.

In XP I hade this experience that with HT off, I could run cpu up to about 70% without crackles and pops. But turning it on made it start crackle at about 40-45% cpu.

I've been reading about this, and apparently with the AMD chips you don't need to do core parking...

And I've seen the opposite...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hp-z400-workstation,2718 -8.html

To the point where I haven't used HT OFF on subsequent workstation tests.

ya - i don't think that turning off HT will help matters much - but i have seen every day how my DAW would clock up and down depending on load - i disabled C1E which is the Intel mhz throttling and things have been nice - slightly more fan noise at all times, but not annoying..

find your energy-saving features (in Windows) & disable them

Make a specific power profile that disables them all, if you use the system for other stuff. Also turn off your antivirus while doing music work.

Excellent, thanks for posting that.

My XP is an old P4, and I guess HT develops by every generation as well.

When my new i7-daw hits the ceiling, I still would test it by turning HT off just out of curiousity - before upgrading to a new daw though. Benchmarks are benchmarks, not reality for every situation.

I dont know how realistic DAWbench is, the Score test is turning a little piece of music into a mixed down track tho, so its pure CPU.

That's what I'm saying. This was as close to a mixed down track as I'm going to get. It had drums, 4 or 5 cpu intensive vsti's plus some pretty intensive fx on it. It wasn't long, but I'm just wondering if this is the other cores kicking in? Like I said, start was maybe 1 vst and an fx. cpu meter read 45 percent. When all was done, cpu meter read 25 percent. Amazing enough because I had Xils 3, PolyKB Player, Predator and Z3ta+. On the dual core Z3ta alone would do 25 percent. Very happy about this, but I don't know why they call this an A8 processor if it's only a quad core...

I think they want to be more/better than Intel i7

The good thing is I haven't found anything having a problem with the 64 bit. Even some very old Synthedit stuff works great.

Spoke too soon. Rapture was quite an adventure. Not so much the install. The install of the original couldn't have gone smoother. It was getting it updated to the newest version. Still. Not that much hassle, and I'd been pre-warned by stuff I'd read on the Cakewalk forum.