# How many cores are recommended?



## kimarnesen (Feb 25, 2018)

To run a large template from VEP on a slave PC, how many cores would be enough to not worry about that? I have 64GB of ram but only 4 cores, so I'm thinking of replacing it. The problems occur when I use many microphones for each instrument.


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## chimuelo (Feb 25, 2018)

Does each Core spike equally?

I’m noticing folks using synth Slaves prefer Intel for its single core performance on 6 Core Slaves.
Then using Ryzen 8/16 Core for Sampled Instruments are happy with performance and pricing.

I’m still behind the curve with i7 5775C and 4 x i7 4790k CPUs.
Waiting for 2H 2018 Ryzens and Intels.
Wasn’t too happy about Intel dropping support i7 6000 series/Z170 so early.
Don’t want to be investing in platforms that drop support because of AMDs competition.
Not to mention no mature platform other than Xeons and Z97.
Same goes to Ryzen, but they do have AM4 which is more mature than Intels recent blitz of new chips.

i7 8700k is an impressive performer though, no doubt about that.


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## kimarnesen (Feb 25, 2018)

Well, the thing is that the Windows 10 activity monitor, or what it's called, says I have an 18% CPU usage during playback, but in Kontakt it says up to 100% and it gets red and it gives some distortions here and there. I see one of the cores are much busier than the other ones though.


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## merlinhimself (Feb 25, 2018)

VEP can be minimally set to 1 thread per instance so it depends on your thread count. A lot of people suggest having as much as you can, but it really depends. One of my slaves at work is a 4core Imac and I've had to offload a lot of instances from my sequencer to the Imac for various reasons. Currently I have 18 instances running on it and havent noticed any issues, but most of the stuff inside them is not very cpu heavy. The more you have the better, I would say 6-8 is a good amount.


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## kimarnesen (Feb 25, 2018)

The strange thing that happened now, is that when I playback clicking on the stack folder track there are no distortion or CPU overloads in Kontakt, but if I select all the instrument tracks one by one it's back again. So there's obviously a difference in Logic!


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## EvilDragon (Feb 25, 2018)

That sounds like Logic's "live input mode", whereby the track you have selected will only get one dedicated thread/CPU core. If that track has a pretty busy Kontakt instance, it's probably saturating that one core Logic dedicated it to. Once you select a track that doesn't have much (or any) plugins on it, Logic can parallelize processing and your dropouts are gone. Read:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201838


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