Personal Quest. - is it worth continually upgrading your rig

While I find it rather arduous at times to get new power supplies, motherboards and CPU’s, as well as to research Chipsets, graphic cards and peripherals; personally I find it rather rewarding when you:

a) meet system requirements, that is by matching hardware to a particular generation of DAW and OS software

b) experience a stable OS that can actually run a DAW such as Cubase, none of this “still supported” operating system, with previous generation software or newer OS on previous generation hardware

c) have enough power to spare for other tasks such as internet and email without interrupting DAW performance

How many here can make the above claims?

I know for a fact that Cubase 7 (7.0.7) is stable, and posts to the contrary are purely the result of user error.

Anyone else who knows how to get their rig humming, please post system specs.

Cheers

I didn’t build my own – I bought a stock HP desktop computer 3 years ago with two drives, super fast quad processor (950), lots of memory, firewire ports, etc. Running Windows 7 64-bit. Internet, email, etc, don’t even register. Cubase is my heaviest load, but it doesn’t really stress the system usually no matter what I throw at it. Native Instruments Studio Drummer is the biggest hog (much worse than Superior Drummer for example), but I can cope with it (per Steinberg’s recommendation, turned off Hyperthreading, and that did help with Studio Drummer).

I’m hoping to stick with this for a while. Not much tuning required. Cubase (6.07) never crashes, performance is great for what I’m doing, and nothing else is even close to burdening the system.

I mean, it’s gotten to the point where the computer and software are no longer an excuse!! Honestly, it’s what we were all hoping for years ago.

It is but statistically we find people mostly complain about tracks colors, folder orientation and pop out windows.

Now where do I start? :angry:

WORD!!!
{‘-’}

“Personal Quest. - is it worth continually upgrading your rig”

Of course! It’s the only way to get closer to that Hit Record!!!

Momma!!

“Personal Quest”?

You, you know what your Personal Quest is :wink: :slight_smile: :smiley: :mrgreen:

I know for a fact that Cubase 7 (7.0.7) is stable, and posts to the contrary are purely the result of user error.

Well isn’t that an interestingly bold statement. I have renewed trust in c7 and now it is time to buy.

I used to upgrade every year to a new system. Then it moved to every couple years to today where I don’t remember when I built my system. People get to the point where cutting edge is not necessary and will stick with what works. Most studios I worked in when i was younger were that way. Once your rig was refined and stable, everything stayed put for a looooong time.

That is where I am now. Everything I need works really well so I stick with it. I don’t need more. Why change anything?

I’ve been upgrading Cubase and keeping Windows patched on my faithful Q6600 PC, but I am reaching a zenith of sorts with the 7.5 upgrade, I am finding that performance is starting to suffer. It would be nice to believe that as software evolves, it both increases in substance as well as optimization, but as we all know, that is not the case.

Recently I had the pleasure of assisting a plug-in developer to find ways to optimize one of his flagship products by acting as a beta tester… it was refreshing to find he succeeded in dropping his CPU requirements by at least 50%… I wish more emphasis would be placed on this at Steiny, rather than broadening the feature set endlessly. But, we all know what the marketing people would say about that… features sell, the under-the-hood stuff, not so much.

Will I upgrade my hardware to accommodate the bloat? … perhaps, but it will require some interface mods, as well as the computer upgrade, so I am going to stick with what I have for now.

I have lots of peers who are still happily using SX3 era Cubase, so its really all about your toolbox requirements.

As for Personal Quest - I never take it personally. :laughing:

Staying on the bleeding edge of technology is too often death by a thousand cuts. See quest? Be quest.

So you can get new features.

As to optimisation and so on, it is deliberate for the sake of stability and as I say, I have an infinitely stable system. All else is the fault of the end user.

All else is the fault of the end user? Are you fishing for something because to me, that is a smart-ass-alienating comment.

No brother, just pointing out that with a correct setup there are no (relevant) issues or problems to be addressed.

So if a system is properly built and configured, it takes software bugs out of the equation?

Here that is not the case, but then again my projects use a lot of resources. Perhaps if that is your case, you may not have as complex projects as I.

I use AMD/ATI systems exclusively, won’t go near Intel unless it’s for a mobile rig but I wasn’t talking about hardware in isolation, I was speaking to the whole.

if you delete the word “continually” in the thread’s title then the rest is a good question that everyone asks himself from time to time. I try to stick as long as possible with the hardware i have, but when things start to rattle then it is time to continue the quest. :slight_smile:

Sounds about right, although I could not imagine for example: running Windows 8.1 on previous generation (non UEFI) hardware, since the security features and fast booting won’t be available.

By the same token, I could not imagine using Cubase 7 with Windows 7 and in fact whenever there’s a new version I make it a point to upgrade my hardware even if in the interim I use a previous version OS.

As to relegated hardware, there’s always the VST system link so no wastage on that front. The only problem being that you must buy additional licenses.

I recently purchased 3 Pulsar II Sonic Core cards and can’t believe the difference in dynamic range, now that technically I am not using the Cubase Mixer (no wonder there are so many debates about bits and floats).

I have it from a good source that Steinberg are moving over from the commodore to the atari later this year , FFS im not looking forward to the swap over ,all of that 2mbs of file converting will take me months … AAreGGHhH wahhayy !