Simplest DAW PC upgrade to boost performance.

Hi Everyone,

If you are in the process of building yourself a DAW PC, and you want to boost it's performance a bit, one of the simplest upgrades I can think of is to install as much Ram (Random Access Memory) on the motherboard as it can accommodate, if your PC's motherboard supports Ram sticks that run at different clock speeds, then try and install sticks that run at the fastest clock speeds that the motherboard supports, and make sure that the Ram sticks are all the same type (ie: matched) for best performance.

Some PC motherboards have more than one Ram slot, both of the motherboards in my two Windows 10 DAW PCs have four Ram slots, some only have one or two, the idea is to max out the Ram because when the PC is booted-up (powered-up) and running, the installed Ram sticks is where all the data that the computer is working on is stored along with the operating system, more Ram means that the computer spends less time transferring data onto the Ram sticks and hard drives, also, the Windows operating system uses some of the space on the main system HDD as virtual memory, in older versions of Windows, this space was called the "Page File", while you're at it I'd also recommend that you set the virtual memory to as much as your computer's operating system will let you, which is usually something like 1.5 times more than the total amount of physical memory installed on the motherboard, although, you can set it a bit larger than that.

I think Mac OSes allow you to do something similar too.


Note that there have been some reports that some DAW software doesn't seem to like running on computers with maxxed-out Ram, the best thing to do in that case is to read the user manual for the DAW software to be sure.


The ram slots on the motherboard in my main DAW PC each support DDR3 Ram sticks up to 8 Gigabytes in size, so with four slots I can install up to a total of 32 Gigabytes of Ram in them, the Compaq DAW PC I've been working on also has four Ram slots, each one supports DDR2 PC5300 Ram Sticks of up to 1 Gigabyte in size, so I can only install up to 4 Gigabytes of Ram in them, which should be plenty.

Some good tips there thanks

Cheers Stan, hope they prove to be useful, if I think of any more useful tips, I'll definitely post them in this thread.


Actually, another good tip I can think of is to upgrade the graphics card to one that has more video Ram on it since this will get the DAW PC running smoother.


Here's another tip, if your DAW PC only has one HDD installed, consider installing a second HDD as a Slave Drive and use it to store all the Audio data files for your multitrack recording sessions, if your DAW PC supports SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachments) HDDs, then consider upgrading from IDE types to SATA types, since the data transfer speeds of SATA HDDs are much faster than IDE HDDs (IDE HDDs transfer data at 133 Mb/s, whereas SATA is capable of up to something like 3Gb/s or faster).


If your DAW PC's motherboard and CPU supports it, consider upgrading to a 64 Bit operating system since this will allow the computer to access more installed Ram, 32 Bit operating systems can only access up to just under 4 Gb of Ram due to the limitations of the 32 Bit architecture, the good news is that most modern CPUs that are 64 Bit capable can also run 32 Bit software at the same time, so you will still be able to install and use your favorite 32 Bit plugins, most of them should happily run on a 64 Bit operating system with no trouble.

Cubase V9 has stopped supporting 32-bit plug-ins, which isn't too much of an issue for newer VSTs as there is normally a 64-bit version of those available. But if you've got some older favourite plug-ins that are 32-bit only, they you are going to have to find newer equivalents.