New iMac - Which upgrades for lots of u-he action?

[wuh]

I've become really fond of both Diva and Bazille and am using them extensively in all my tracks at the moment. Bazille is usually the thing I open first when I sit down to make some music. I'm on a 2009 core duo iMac right now, and I have to say, considering its age, it doesn't do a bad job of running these synths - even a couple of instances is fine. However, I do frequently run into cpu issues when I have a lot of notes being triggered or more than 2 or 3 instances. Freezing and unfreezing tracks is a pain, to say the least.

So, at some point in the not too distant future I will buy a new iMac. I was wondering, which (if any) of the upgrades I should go for? It is only possible to upgrade to an i7 processor on the flagship 27" version, apparently this has hyper-threading while the i5 doesn't. My question is, would Diva and Bazille benefit more from that upgrade than, say, upping the RAM and maybe upgrading to a solid state drive?

Perhaps the flagship model alone without upgrades is enough? I'll surely notice a big difference moving from this machine - now almost 6 years old.

Any advice much appreciated

[tehlord]

It's going to be the CPU that benefits you most. Going to a quad core i7 from a dual core i5 will see a massive improvement.

[wuh]

The i5 is also a quad-core CPU, so I'm curious if u-he plugins make use of hyper-threading in the i7s, or whether there are other, more general advantages to the i7 which makes it a better choice?

[tehlord]

Your current i5 is dual core though right?

In any case, I see significant improvement when I switch on hyper threading in Diva

[wuh]

Currently I have a 2.93 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo.. I don't know if that's different to an i5, old though Considering how long this has lasted, I'm pretty confident upgrading to an i7 will be a good move. Maybe a small SSD too.

[aaron aardvark]

I have owned an iMac for almost 5 years (bought it new). I used it with Cubase LE4 and OSX 10.6.8, with Zebra/ZebraHZ and Diva, working well. Then I "updated" to OSX 10.9.3 (Mavericks) with Cubase Elements 7 (trial version): now my Zebra/ZebraHZ and Diva virtual knobs and controls work very poorly, and I noticed some problems with some of my "French" synth plug-ins. I plan on reverting back to my old set up. Not sure how typical my problems are. 3.06 Ghz, Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 Gb memory, 1067 MHz DDR3

[jdoo]

Both will work well - but the i7 will perform better, all other things being equal. Where you don't want to skimp, is in system memory. I have identical i5 iMac systems at our place, both running Logic Pro. On one, I have upped the system RAM to 12GB, by plopping a pair of 4 GB DIMMs in, bringing total RAM to 12 GB. 2 x 2GB and 2 x 4 GB. This system is noticeably faster, and works with fewer glitches when pushing the boundaries of Diva and other memory-hungry AU instruments in Logic Pro. The other system works fine with 8GB of RAM ( 4 x 2GB), but is slower. So, I'd say, get as much processor power as you can afford, and then - beef up the RAM. For ~ $100... a 8GB RAM bump over a stock 4GB system, is huge.