Things to do to improve performance

terrencej31 said:

How do you Disable Turbo Boost and C-State Transition (BIOS)? This is advised for Avid Pro Tools to work smoothly.

These things are enabled/disabled in the BIOS which you can access by pressing DEL, F2 or a different key on the POST screen when you first turn on your computer. The key to press is usally written on the screen, eg. "Press DEL to enter setup".

Depending on your BIOS these things could be called different names. I don't have a CPU that supports turbo boost but I think it might be called "Intel Turbo Mode Tech" or similar going by a different boards manual.

C-State is listed as "Intel C-State Tech" on my motherboard.

As for AMD CPU's and boards I have no idea is they have similar tech or what they would be called.

EDIT:For others this is from Avid - Windows Guide - Windows 7 Optimizations and Troubleshooting.

I find IO's game booster a very useful little utility. It can tell you if there are updates to drivers and close any services that are plain just not required when gaming.
I have it set to close 14 services and it does so automatically I run any game, turning things back on when the game quits.

Be sure that you test before making any of these changes and test afterwards. I find a lot of these applications give you a nice warm fuzzy feeling that things really improved, but in actuality, real world performance increases are simply not there.

And test with a stopwatch and such to measure real world time improvements. Using benchmark tools can be misleading as the numbers may improve and look significant, but if your overall boot time/start time only improves by 0.15ms...does it really make a difference?