Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Surface Pro 2017 vital power plan tweak”.
Hopefully, you’ve already tweaked your system with the video I put up recently, which covers the new windows, full creators update, and if you have, then your system should be working pretty well for audio. However, with the surface pro 2017 there’s something else that you have to do and, as I’ve said many times, their CPU within the surface, pro is not really designed for music making, because the sort of thing that we want is loads and loads of power. On all the time, that’s what we want. That’S our basic requirement. However, you are not going to find a CPU which does that within a gorgeous mobile touchscreen environment, it just not going to happen, they stick in ultrabook processes and they are designed to shut power down.
As quickly as possible, in order to conserve battery life, so we have this dynamic going on where we’re trying to sort of battle against that sort of thing. Back on the surface pro 3 that worked really well, it’s only problems being heat and when it got to a certain thermal level, the processor would step down, regardless of what you tried to do, and that could seriously ruin your project on the surface Pro for the Cpu is banging around so much all the time that you just got glitching nearly all the time until they fixed that and made it a lot more stable with the surface Pro 2017. There’S stability up to a point and then there’s this lovely space of sort of Turbo Power, which is too erratic to actually make use of. Let me try to illustrate this. I’Ve got the Intel extreme tuning utility running here, which is just showing us CPU usage and CPU frequency. Now, as I run a test project, the CPU will leap up in order to try to use all of the power available to it within its turbo profile, and you think that’s great. I’M loading up tons and tons of plug-ins here and, as you can see here this particular point here – it was up to about 3.3 gigahertz 3.2 3.2 gigahertz, which is amazing, and within that space I could load a ton of plugins and keep on going to keep On going and then for no suitably explore reason, it just dropped down to 2.6. Just like that, I mean there must be a trigger, but darned. If I can find it – and I find that actually it’s more likely that it just goes up down bit up bit down bit up bit down and that’s no good, because if you’ve loaded plugins within the space of about three point, two gigahertz once it dropped your Audio is going to crackle and disappear because it’s not coping with the amount of stuff you’ve got loaded. Turbo mode on a processor is designed to do quick tasks and then come back again go off and do something fast and then come back again, but we’re loading. It up to a constant amount of processor usage and that’s not what this is designed for. So I’ve got door bench loaded here with a whole load of plugins. If I’d load that now we should see the effect of the CPU. So did you see that that was quite interesting when I hit play it left up to 3.3 something-or-other and playback was fine and then suddenly it went. Oh no, this coming right. I can’t stay up here because the whole thing will just catch fire, so it dropped down again and that killed the playback. It went all glitchy, that’s not good. We can’t have that because you can’t work in that turbo space. You can’t there’s nothing. You can do to work in there, it’s not designed for that, but I mean particularly the i-5, because it’s fanless and so needs to retain some kind of sensible level of thermal dynamics. So what do we do? Well, there’s a very, very simple tweak, which I found to be extremely effective: it’s to do with our power settings. So if we go power edit power plan, that’s what we want now we’ve got it set to high-performance. We know that another quick tip here that if you weren’t able to find high performance, when you did my other tweak video press on, create a power plan and then the high performance option will become available by the by high-performance change. Plan.
Settings advanced power settings in here go down to processor, power management, minimum and maximum, and you want to set the minimum and maximum to 99 % genius. Yes, I know so 99 and here 99 hit okay, and what we will find is that the CPU will no longer jump up into that turbo range. It will stay stuck at about two point: five six, which is you know, roundabout, the normal operating speed of the processor. Now my project here is loaded with enough plugins to run in three point three gigahertz, so it’s not going to be able to handle all of these when running at two point five, so let me do disable a bunch of these first. Otherwise, it would just crack or like crazy, okay, so there’s a comfortable amount of plug-in, there’s still some room here at the end. If we go back to our performance meter here, we can see that it’s more or less stable. It does move a little bit at the moment. It’S a two point.
Five, eight and it sort of goes to point five, eight down to two point: four and up again, but not really enough to make a plugins worth of difference, whereas when it’s wagging itself up to three point three and you suddenly find yourself adding more stuff. When that crashes back down is just a disaster, so in restricting the processor power to 99 %, I’m enabling more stability in the system, I’m preventing turbo mode. Yes, so potentially I’m losing some performance, you could say, but I’m gaining a level of stability that wasn’t previously there. The other side of that is that I’m not going to overwork the thermals of the system, so it’s not going to overheat either. So the net result of all that is that I have a much more stable, predictable and consistent system, and that’s what you want. That is the holy grail of the audio computer.
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