Hey Scott Two things for sure. You need more ram and you really want a different drive just for audio. I have only experienced pro tools on two machines so far. One is my 2010 mbp 15" with an i7, 8 gb of ram and an ssd. The other was an older 8 core mp with I believe 8 gb of ram. That machine was running pro tools hd with an hd3 card and I found it slow in comparison to my dual core i7. I believe the most important thing to speeding up pro tools performance is the speed of the drive plus the ammount of ram. Another key factor is the performance of the io subsystem. In the new series of chips like the i3 i5 and i7 is the qpi bus. Quick path interconnect is a much more efficient way of moving data from different components of the system to the processor and back. The other thing that you have to keep in mind is the disk. It may be a 7200 rpm disk but if it is an older one then it will have a much lesser bit density. This effects read speed more than rotational latency. This means that on each rotation pro tools can buffer more audio in from the drive.
The question really comes down to do you have money for a new system right now. This years mbp is really a step up from last years. I feel kind of cheated a little. Most of the time systems from year to year show a small percentage improvement. This year the same 15" gets two more cores with the same battery life. The 13" has the same processor that my 15" has. Either one would be fine. I put an ssd in mine and it is truly amazing. The higher end 13" with the 2.7 i7 dual core or the lower end 15" with the 2.0 quad core i7 are the sweet spots for price. If you don't have the money than upgrade the memory to as much as you can put in the thing you've got, get an firewire 800 7200 rpm disk and see how it goes. Take care --FC On Apr 4, 2011, at 4:51 AM, Scott Chesworth wrote: > Hi folks, > > So yesterday, I started out recording my first entirely PT based > project since getting back on Avid's horse. For the most part, the > session went pretty well. I'm digging into comping takes and doing > some tidying up today, and noticing that my Mac is seriously > struggling. Wondered whether anyone more seasoned could give an > opinion about whether this is normal. > > So, I'm running a Core2Duo 2.4ghz, 2gb RAM, the session is running > from the system drive in an effort to see what the limitations of > traveling extra light are, but that drive is definitely 7200 RPM. The > session I'm working with has 20 tracks, most of which have two plugins > in the forms of compressor/gate/EQ etc. There's also two instances of > Sansamp PSA-1, and one instance of Eleven. Seeing as I'm no longer > recording, I've taken the H/W buffer size to 1024, and made pretty > much everything that I'm not using inactive. > > Should this spec of Mac really be on it's knees at this point? I know > it's not the latest and greatest, but a buddy of mine's Mac mini can > cope with this without breaking a sweat. The difference is that he's > using an older hence inaccessible version of PT, version 7 I think. > > Any advice welcome, even if it's time for my Mac to be checked into > the big genius bar in the sky... > > Scott
