upgrade pc to run smoothly with FLstudio help!!

PioneerCdj

need help with my pc, i originally had a 2 gig ram philips iqon for making music on fruity loops, the ram wasn strong enough it was always lagging and crackling, so i bought a new custom built pc 4 gig ram and was hoping with more ram it will stop the latency, i didnt stop keeps lagging and crackling ect.. for any 1 that knows fruity loops i have turned all the buffer lengths changed everything to try make that lag stop.. i noticed that when it was crackling my cpu was just to 100 and starting to crash so i presume its my cpu thats not able because my ram is fine, so ive decided to upgrade my cpu and ram and i was wondering for any one that no's a good cpu and motherboard that will make my pc run smoothly, about 250 budget, any help appreciated

ED E

Two things control response time/audio lag:

CPU: You want 50% more than you need so if it peaks you wont stutter.
Soundcard: A proper ASIO sound card is a pretty crucial part, dont use onboard audio if you're serious.

A midrange Phenon quad would be plenty IIRC.

PioneerCdj

ED E wrote: »

Two things control response time/audio lag:

CPU: You want 50% more than you need so if it peaks you wont stutter.
Soundcard: A proper ASIO sound card is a pretty crucial part, dont use onboard audio if you're serious.

A midrange Phenon quad would be plenty IIRC.

what i have on the pc is

Amd Athlon 3500+ MHz Processor
4 Gb Ram
160 Gb Hard Disk
ATI 256mb FireGL x2 256T Graphic Card with 2 DVI
Dvd drive
ABIT AV8 motherboard

from looking at that do u think my pc should be strong enough, or would it be that my sound card is not good enough? im not really in the no with the hard ware side of pc's, thanks for the help

tuxy

The athlon 3500+ is 8 years old now so probably has trouble with newer multithreaded applications
I don't use any music editing software but something like this will give you much more processing power

Item|Price
Intel Core i3-3225 Box, LGA1155|€119.27
ASRock B75 Pro3-M, Sockel 1155, mATX|€60.32
8GB-Kit G.Skill PC3-10667U CL9|€32.54
Shipping|€18.99
Total|€231.12

Your power supply might need adaptors to work with the new motherboards.
Getting a dedicated sound card might be a good idea too but I don't know which ones are good.
As I said I don't edit music so best to check with someone who does to make sure the parts I picked are good for the job.

kumate_champ07

a good sound card fixes latency problems. 2gb of ram should be plenty for fruity loops.
thomann.de has decent value/quality pro audio cards

tuxy

Is an athlon 3500+ good enough if you're using loads of effects in fruity loops?
He does say cpu usage hit's 100% which can't be good.

kumate_champ07

ye if its hitting 100% with 200ms or longer buffer its too slow. ram isnt that important unless your working with a lot of long audio recordings in a multi track enviorment, not multiple little samples like drum hits or instrument notes that are re-triggered

probably depends on what kind/how many of VSTs are running but Fruity Loops I thought wasnt very CPU intensive

tuxy

If he gets a new processor he will have to get ddr 3 ram, 8gb is cheap so I was thinking he might as well get 8.

ED E

Threading isn't huge in the production/live audio world, its more just one very fast process.

OP budget 100 for a decent Interface(soundcard), some.are USB2 but most good ones are firewire 800 or USB3. These are built for what you want do. Don't need anything fancy unless you wanna use hardware effects or perform live.