I have a Surface Pro 7 with an Intel i7 and 16gb RAM. When I run Rack on it for any extended period this sucker get’s HOT, but it usually plays patches fine up to 100% CPU max usage. I usually have a Novation Launch Control XL as a midi controller and have a set of headphones or IEMs that I use with a dongle DAC. My home studio has a Lenovo ThinkStation with a Xeon E5-2670 and 64GB RAM. This machine has significantly more equipment attached to it thru USB connections and I have 7 separate internal hubs and two good quality external powered hubs where I try to distribute controllers, sound cards, etc., evenly.
Now am I incorrectly thinking my Desktop is a far superior machine that should effortlessly handle any patch the Surface can?
I have a patch called Mosaic that has many iterations, and I was working on it out of town the past few days on my Surface. It’s really not large a all, running on average below 60% max CPU. I brought this patch home to integrate into Ableton and before I did that, I opened it as a stand alone and removed the MIDI MAP module and set the audio module to my 18i20 interface just to have a quick listen - and because I’ve had this issue before, wanted to check the PU usage. It’s above 200% max, and absolutely un-useable like this. Why might this be?
Surface:
At the time of the screen shots where the Surface was playing fine but not the Desktop, the Surface was running 3 threads and the desktop one. Just reviewing what Marc linked to above.
Thanks Marc. My Power Plan for the Desktop and the Surface have always been on High Performance. I have been using both Ableton and Reaper for several years on this particular Desktop.
I don’t think your Xeon is configured wrong. The newer generation i7 is just that much faster WRT core cpu clock speed - memory bus speed, and memory speed. And it has some extensions that the Xeon doesn’t have. Diffent GPU’s may or may not have a large significance - but I think your two systems are more or less equal in that regard. The communication speed between CPU and GPU is probably much faster on the Surface.
Edit: Given the exact cpu info, the cpu clock of the i7-1065G7 is slower avg, higher boost, but presumably not boosting much when running hot.
Oh for… It is counter-intuitive to this fellow that adding threads would lower the CPU usage and it says right there in brackets in the drop down menu next to 1 (Lowest CPU usage, so no - I didn’t even try that which is dumb of me. I have set it to 4 threads und walla! hovering around 50%. Apologies for wasting peoples time and thanks very much for giving me a hand.
