I would give Mixcraft a B+ on efficiency. While it's less resource intensive than some hosts, I wouldn't say it's the most efficient.rod_zero wrote:Is mixcraft cpu efficient?ntom wrote: It uses z97 architecture with an quad i5 Haswell at 3.4ghz, with 8gb RAM (probably the biggest short coming of the build), a 750w Platinum PSU, and a (irrelevant to music) EVGA GTX780 6GB edition.
Doing a Diva Stress Test:
ten 3-voiced instances of Diva on Divine hit 50%
I work on Live and an i5 760 ( I think its two generations before the one you have) and I can only get 4 Diva instances on Divine.
I wanna try to overclock my current CPU to see if I gain some performance.
According to you, the i5 you have is probably the main bottleneck of your system as it seems to be an early generation of the i5 series of cores. It's hard to say specifically since I am not a CPU architect, but the difference mostly seems to been in the manufacturing technology, where Haswell uses 22nano meter dyes, the Lynnfield CPU you mentioned uses a 45nm dye. What this means to you is that it will naturally get hotter, and with more heat means higher power consumption.
It might be possible to overclock the chip a little - I personally am not an overclocker. But I can tell you is that Intel uses letters in the model number to denote the capabilities of the chip. For example;
I have an i5 4670k. The K means that this chip is very capable of over clocking and is unlocked from factory settings. if there is no letter, like you i5 760 - this means it's an OEM part, manufactured to factory specific settings. Overclocking may be possible, but in most cases you won't be able to squeeze much more juice out of it.
But, here's the bright side to that: due to the 45nm dye, unless you have exceptional cooling in your system, you wouldn't want to push it too high anyways, otherwise you're just going to melt your system
There are plenty of tools out there to help you overclock. I believe there is an ASUS tool that you basically type in the clock speed you want to reach and it will automatically run as many cycles as it needs to try and achieve that speed (try to...doesn't always make it - especially if you type something unreasonable like 10ghz
)Additionally, if you are just curious about cooling in general in your system, there is Piriform's Speccy which will give you temperatures of your hard drive(s), CPU, GPU, and motherboard. I use it a lot for benchmarking systems, but I will mention I have seen this software bug out sometimes with OEM motherboards. On an old itb Lenovo system I had it would tell me the motherboard was at 120 * Celsius - which, as you might know, should mean melted motherboard
Anyways, the best way to test out your system is to just try the software. Acoustica has a generous 30 day demo (and if you ask nicely they'll give you an extension on your trial too). For stress testing, I just put a virtual instrument track down with diva, place 3 random notes, then duplicate that track over and over until the software crashes
If you need me too, I can record how to do that since getting familiar with a new piece of software can take some time.
Also, energy consumption = heat generation. AMD processors overheat quite easy, which can make system unstable in hotter days. It also makes cooling louder which makes it harder to listen to stuff coming out of monitors. Especially that many AMD stock coolers could very well replicate airport traffic while at full speed 
