My new Triplecore PC has terrible CPU spikes

[basically me]

I just finished installing FL Studio 8 om my new Acer AMD 2.1ghz triple core PC (it has 3 gigs of RAM). I also installed the program on my old PC that is only a 2.2 ghz single core with 512mb of RAM.

-FL Studio 8 is a music production program. You can load multiple synthesizer plug-ins in the program which can really put a load on the CPU/RAM.

Anyways, I just tryed playing the same demo song from the program on both of my computers and my old one runs it much better. The audio starts skipping and popping when the PC can't keep up. But on my new PC this starts really bad right at the beginning, and when the song is stopped the CPU is idling around 45% (when i do this on my old PC it idles around 15%, and the song can play almost normally up until a lot of the synth plug-ins start playing simultaneously).


With the song playing on my new PC I opened up the task manager and the CPU load only said about (average of the 3 cores) was around 25-30% (the memory usage was around 900mb), but the FL Studio prorgam says it spikes to about 80%.

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The FL Studio program has it's own CPU and RAM monitors at the top of it's screen. With the song playing the it says the CPU is at 80-90%. Under the RAM slot it says around 240mb. If I click on the RAM slot it gives me the option to show 'available RAM' and 'used RAM'. The available RAM is only 1024 (my PC has 3 gigs). And the 'used RAM' is only 240mb, even though the program is has access to 3 gigs it only says 1024mb is available, and it only uses around 240mb. Is there a setting with the computer that allows me to allocate CPU and RAM to cetain programs, or does this sound like an issue with the program?

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One other thing, when I'm just on the desktop (on my new PC) with no programs running, the task manager says the physical memory is around 37% Is that normal?

Is there some setting or something I'm missing that is causing this FL Studio program to run much worse on my new PC? And for some reason when I click on the task manager to view it while FL Studio is playing a song a get an error that says "a call to an os function failed" and the program crashes. This only happens if I open the task manager though.

If anyone can help me it would be much appreciated.

 

[Remeniz]

Download ASIO4ALL.

I reckon your using a bad audio driver. I do music too and use ASIO drivers where I can.

When you install ASIO4ALL you have to adjust it's buffers to give you a smooth audio output without drop-outs.

If you already have an ASIO driver on your audio interface then go into the settings and adjust the size of the buffers.

Also there's a few things you can do to the computer to streamline it for audio production. And it looks like your OS isn't accessing all you RAM for some reason.

Whats your system specs?

 

[basically me]

ASIO4ALL was installed with FL Studio. Does that mean its automatically being used, or do I have to change a setting somewhere to use the ASIO4ALL driver?

and the sample rate was set at the 2048 (around there) default. On my old PC with 1/3 the CPU and RAM as my new one this was pretty good. The song ran decently. But I have to set the latency to at least double that to get the same performance out of my new PC.

And my computer's specs are:

AMD Phenom 8550 triple core 2.1ghz
3 gb RAM
Integrated ATI Radeon 2100 video card
Integrated Realtek high definition audio card

--My old PC has is an AMD 2.2ghz single core with 512mb RAM. It too has only integrated sound and video cards (which i assume are worse than my new PC's because the old one is 3 years old)

And thanks for the reply.


---EDIT:
I just found out that my sound driver wasn't set to the ASIO4ALL, so i changed it. This helped, but even if I set the ASIO4ALL driver to the max latency (2048ms, or something like that) it still randomly will cut out and skip back and forth for a while before continuing playing the track.

I just changed the same setting in FL Studio 8 on my old PC (to ASIO4ALL). Even with the latency set to 512ms it outperforms my new PC by far. Even with 1/4 of the latency that my new PC is using, my old PC can run the track while using almost half the CPU and RAM that my new PC has to use.

This is so annoying. I buy a new computer expecting things to run smoother, not worse.

If you have any ideas please let me know. Thanks.

 

[Remeniz]

Have a look at these articles.

XP Tweaks For Music.
Vista Tweaks For Music.

 

[basically me]

Have a look at these articles.

XP Tweaks For Music.
Vista Tweaks For Music.

Thanks. I'll give that article a look. Theres got to be something in there that will at least help somewhat.

I did most of the tweaks listed in that article and it brought my idle CPU load from around 36% down to around 24%. And the tracks play almost perfect in FL Studio. The crackling is gone, but every 30 seconds or so (when there's a lot going on in the song) it will just cut out for about 1-2 seconds and keep on going. This is still annoying, but definitely not as bad as before.

Thanks again Remeniz.