As it says - is it better to disable Hyperthreading in the bios or can I just leave it enabled?
Running 32bit Cubase and Nuendo in various Versions, now in Win7/64bit and on an i7 950
Brandy
Open and play (render) one of your “biggest” project…
With HT enabled you may have some issues like audio clicks and pop… if not you’re OK, if so switch HT to Off.
Cheers,
Bernard
Does that make any performance difference?
We are talking about loosing 50% of the CPUs when switching off… At least when I look at the Taskmanager.
From what I have red Hyperthreading should be on and Cubase can use it, but as Bernard indicates if you have any unexpected problems it is something you could turn off to see if it resolves the issues.
Ok, repeat after me: “There is no BIOS or Win7 tweaking on modern i7 systems” “There is no BIOS or Win7 tweaking on modern i7 systems”
WTF would one turn HT off, which is the biggest performance boost of the new processors.
Leave speedstep on, leave HT on, it’s NOT a problem
only things you “might” want to do is put your win7 power scheme on “balanced” or “high performance” to avoid sleep and initilasation issues of devices recovering from sleep mode.
Also if you have “cpu whine” (high pitched modem/gsm type sound, coming from your CPU) turn C1E state off, that’s it The rest is BS, confusing and unneccecary.
I agree with the rest –
But the the above leaves me wondering how you would overclock an i7, if you wanted to if there was no bios tweaking. See http://www.forums.pureoverclock.com/showthread.php?t=5736
whether you use it or not is a personal choice, but there certainly is Bios tweaking in modern i7 systems.
Ofcourse one can overclock, change mem clock ratios, one needs to turn of hyperthreading becuase the system will NOT pass prime95 OC’ed with HT on. What does that tell you ?!? NOT STABLE
I assume the people here look for stability rather than OC’ing
so like for like on a factory clocked system, there is no performance increase by turning HT off, only a decrease to half of it’s parallel threads, HT is just another barrier that needs to be turned off in order to OC
I’m not going to get into a flame war over this, but there are very many examples of overclocks on i7 systems that are stable with HT on and pass Prime95, contrary to what you say, though these overclocks are not as high as you could get with HT off. But for Cubase HT must be on for maximum efficiency, but this does not rule out overclocking.
Turbo on is more problematic for audio with X58 systems. With Sandybridge it’s mixed, apparently 2600k is good with turbo on.
The main issue is stability and temperature vs noise and a good overclock has to pass Prime95 and a few others as well, that goes without saying. It has to be STABLE even if it’s overclocked and they are not mutually exclusive words.
Though that said I imagine Steinberg would advise against it, but hopefully without treating adults like children.
overclocking is for kids, serious people just go for stabillity. MAC users can’t even overclock 
for DAW usage will a stock i950 even perform better than an OC’ed one with HT off.
So back on topic. with stock clockspeeds HT needs to be on. and there is nothing to tweak that will make your PC work harder or more efficient in Cubase. Not in Win7, not in the BIOS.
There was that very interesting Win7 optimasation article the other day, that was shared on Gearslutz amongs a lot of other producers forums. besides the usual blabla around the advantage of x64 and running x86 daw in x64 OS, there was NOTHING that could be classified as an actual performance improvement tweak. There was 1 thing mentioned about a registry tweak, for users that had problems with multicore and affinity, but that one was for reference and even not needed by the editors themselves (i’ve never had any affinity issues since Vista)
bold statement (but very true) 99% of the software issues (unsuspected blue screens, lockups, hickups etc) arrise from OC’ing or using cracked software. (or both)
So be safe: run stock speed, buy legal software
There’s nothing wrong with overclocking if you know what you’re doing. (ie, not for the non technical types) Just don’t push it to extremes. Stability and longevity is the key for our intended purposes. Electronics and thermal dynamics cause all kinds of weird glitches without extreme cooling measures. 
Oh yes, there is one: disable windows media center. It eliminated audio glitches at low latencies on both my desktop pc and laptop.
wierd, since WMC is only a shell / front end? which is started when called, but not lurking resources, or claiming drivers when not being used? sharing the same hardware as other programs. (I’ve removed it as well on my DAW )
I agree for a dedidcated DAW PC there is still a lot of Win7 programs that should not be on there, but these are programs, not latent services in the background.
WMC is a sleeping monster. It won’t hurt till it gets started the very first time. There it will do some weird self configuration which, amongst other things, includes its own autostart. And this is where the problems start to appear.
Another thing which I’d advice to deactivate is the networking stuff, in particular the wireless stuff, including blutooth. It can severely interfere with the audio stream.