Power benchmark for a dual G5 w PT LE 7.0 & 002

i hace a fairly new dual G5 (2 GHz and 2,5 GB RAM; I must have been on of the last people buying a non-intel Mac...) since I mostly use my ProTools LE (7.0) for simple recording/editing/premixing, i do not have lots of experience with plug-ins but for my last project i am using more and more plug ins and i now reached the ceiling and start wondering if i should/could expect more power I have around 24 tracks with the following plug-ins used: DigiRack: 1 x 1 band EQ 2 x 4 band EQ 1 x Trim 1 x Compressor II 1 x DVerb Others: 2 x T-Racks EQ 1 x NI Guitar combo it works fine, but if a add more I start to get "too many plug-ins"-messages. I am running a standard OS10.4.5. mac with no special setups and a Standard PT LE with the h/w buffer set to 1024 and the threshold set to 85%, DAE Buffer Level 2. from you experience: a) is there somrthing wrong with my setup? b) or did i just get greedy and what i have is about what i gould expect with my setup? thanks for your experience!

I've got a pretty similar system... I guess Ni guitar combo is a total cpu hog, because I can run the Music pro pack, (48 tracks), with eq and compression on every channel, a couple of Tl Space conv reverbs, several xpands and strike w/ no issues.... So I think you might have an issue with your system.... Have you made sure all your plugs are up to date?

thanks for you reply chris; the plugs ins are probably not the lastest ones, maybe i'll try without them (only with LE plugs) and see if this improves / changes something; the strange thing is, that i have nothing added or removed or changed; its basically the mac and the PT LE out of the box, plus the NI pack and some foc plugs which came with LE. (actually i also have installed MS Office for mac, but thats about it) i deliberately do not do anything else with this system, therefore its quite disappointing; is there something (maybe VERY basic and simple) to configure which I might have forgotten? cheers, claus

Check out the pro tools 7 plug-ins and compatibility thread in this forum to find lots of info on this. It should tell you what plugs you should not use, and also how to set up your comp for best performance... Best of luck

Re: Power benchmark for a dual G5 w PT LE 7.0 & 00 

Absolutely make sure you have the latest versions of all your plugs and that they are PT7 compatible. Pre PTLE 7 plugs can cause performance issues. From what I've heard NI plugs can use some juice too. It sounds like I have a very similar set up and I usually have; a stereo instrument track with Strike, 4-8 guitar, tracks 4-6 vocal tracks, another instrument track with XPand, eq & comp (usually EQ3, and various comps) on pretty much everything, plus 5 verbs and a couple of delays on aux tracks. And at max buffer settings am using 50-60% of the cpu via DIGI's performance meter. Also what kind of Hard Drive are you using? An internal drive will be the most efficient. I have a 400GB SATA drive I use.

Re: Power benchmark for a dual G5 w PT LE 7.0 & 00 

For dual procesor Machine you should always keep processor usage at 99%. Download version 7.1cs2 and check in your plugins folder all plugins must have .dpm extension,course only Dual Proccessor Module compatibile plugins attacks two processor I hope this help a lot Bye.