Poor Performance When working with Audio on my new High powered laptop

Greetings guys,

I'm just at a loss of what to do so I'd thought I'd post here.

I recently purchased a custom built laptop from pcspecialist.co.uk

The relevant specs:

• Kingston MS200 SSD 240GB (system drive)
• Hitachi 7200RPM HDD 500GB (storage drive)
• Intel Core i7-4712MQ @ 2.30GHz
• 16GB DDR3 RAM
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

I use a DAW application for working with audio projects:

Ableton Suite 9.1.8

So I'm thinking, gone are the days of not having enough power. Get my system loaded, install Ableton and all my plugins. It was a speed demon at first, but 2 weeks ago (only had it for a month) I started to get deep into a project for the first time. I had a couple of audio drop-outs due to HD Overload (disk not fast enough to keep up with all the tracks being played). It wasn't a huge session, only 40-45 WAVs at 24bit/48kHz at a time.

I started doing things like loading the files directly into RAM to avoid issues. All was good for a bit, and then in the last couple of days it has become unbearable. I get HD overloads on anything with a decent track count. This makes no sense to me, running stuff off an SSD with this much RAM as well. Not to mention, if it's loaded to RAM, then an HD overload shouldn't matter, should it?

I've ran all the diagnostic tools I've found, they all say the drive is fine. TRIM is activated by default in Win7, but I've doublechecked and everything is in order. BIOS AHCI is activated, and all of my chipset drivers are up to date.

Strange things:

• I get the same performance when reading off the SSD that I do when reading off the HDD. Obviously an issue right there.
• I still get it despite RAM loading ALL audio files
• It seems to be sporadic, as sometimes sessions will run fine and then be unstable the next day

Any ideas? I'm ready to cry here.

 

Welcome Ronald :major

Having the latest drivers isn't always the best, also try to minimise any 'utility' software and drivers that are resident, exclude safe data folders from your security software.

Latency monitor might be useful, as might the help pages at the foot of the link: http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

Similar for DPC Latency Checker: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml