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default30l8js8fucn5
Participant
May 6, 2021
Question

Audtion very sluggish on my new gaming laptop with good specs (Dell G5 SE)

  • May 6, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 415 views

Hi all, I'm a Podcast editor with a few clients. I picked up a Dell G5 5505 SE from Best Buy a couple weeks ago, specs are awesome, gaming is great on it, however as soon as I load up any of my old Audition files I've edited in, the program slows to a crawl. Just dragging a clip from one place to another with take a few seconds of lag. It's essentially unusable for my job. I know the issue isn't my specs being too low, since I'm upgrading from an 2012 HP Business laptop that had a 3rd-gen quad-core i7, and my old HP is able to load up the same audition files and edit no problem.

 

MY CURRENT SPECS:

AMD Ryzen 7 4800H

AMD Radeon RX 5600M

16gb Memory (Upgraded from 😎

144hz 1080p IPS Display

512gb SSD

 

One thing to note is that when an Audition project is completely empty and I just stick one Wav file in there, it works just fine. As soon as have multiple tracks and started chopping them all up, after just some light editing the program eventually becomes unusable.

 

Also notable as that this laptop uses AMD's "SmartShift" technology (which I'm unable to switch off) where it dynamically adjusts power between the built-in integrated graphics and discrete RX5600m. Not sure if that could be causing any of these issues.

 

LASTLY: I have bounced between the newest version of Audition available, and tried using the newest Beta version as well. No difference, still extremely sluggish.

 

Any ideas? Anyone else specicifically with this same laptop and having similar issues? Do Adobe apps not play well with mobile Ryzen platforms? Should I return this thing while I'm still in the window and get an 11th-gen Intel laptop instead?

 

Thanks!

 

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

SteveG_AudioMasters_
Community Expert
SteveG_AudioMasters_Community Expert
Community Expert
May 6, 2021

This issue, exactly as you describe it, has been reported by a number of people. And as yet we have got no information about it officially, and are not sure what causes it. If you actually get freezes, then Microsoft has been implicated, because they now run a background process called WAASMedic Agent, which supposedly helps the Microsoft updating service run smoothly by forcing anything else trying to run to get out of the way, and taking over HD access. This has been implicated in slowdowns by a lot of people, as a google search will reveal. Running sessions with multiple clips certainly requires a significant amount of HD access, though.

 

One thing I'd noticed about your specification that is a bit (actually quite a lot) on the light side is your HD. Ideally you should have at least two, preferrably three. And one of them should be dedicated to temp files, both for Audition and the OS, and they should also be in separate directories. Because it will get a lot of writes, you have to regard this drive as sacrificial. You keep the OS and object software (like Audition) on another, and the third you use for file storage. The system I have that's configured like this (it actually has several other drives too) doesn't particularly exhibit freezing symptoms at all, but this laptop certainly does. The 'sacrificial' drive, despite getting a lot of writes, hasn't actually failed yet, several years in, but if it does, then swapping it out is relatively painless.

 

But if we get any more information about freezing in general, there will be a post about it on the forum.

    D
    default30l8js8fucn5Author
    Participant
    May 8, 2021

    Gotcha, thanks so much! So no specfic word if the program not being well optimized for Ryzen mobile processors is part of the problem? Because yeah, again my old HP from 2012 with about 1/4 of the benchmarks and processing power runs audition way smoother. And yes absolutely, I'm planning on grabbing another NVMe SSD for this thing soon, it has an open drive bay for a 2nd one.

     

    Thanks again! I have a feeling I'll just need to wait it out for Adobe to put out some more updates to properly utilize my specs. Fingers crossed.

    SteveG_AudioMasters_
    Community Expert
    SteveG_AudioMasters_Community Expert
    Community Expert
    May 8, 2021

    Couple of things: Audition used to be optimised to work more smoothly on Intel processors, but last I heard, it shouldn't really make a difference what you use now. If I build up another machine, it will almost certainly use an AMD processor because on the face of it, you get rather more bang for your buck. The second thing is that if you look inside the case of your machine, you'll almost certainly find that there are available connections and just as importantly, space, for several other drives. Another good thing about SSDs is that because they don't have any movable parts and are generally quite small and light and don't get very warm, you can stick them pretty much anywhere inside the case. I have a PC tower case with about three of them sitting on the bottom of it. They've been there for years and been absolutely no trouble. So you  really shouldn't be limited to just adding the one external drive...

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