Economical set up for running Finale well on a 4K monitor

Discuss technical issues with keyboards, sound, video cards, etc.

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TonyEastwood
Posts: 60
Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2021 8:37 am
Finale Version: 27.0.0708
Operating System: Windows

Post by TonyEastwood » Mon Dec 27, 2021 8:02 pm

My private personal computer has just died. I need a new desktop machine to run Finale. This can be configured quite precisely from components (i.e. I choose the parts, and the supplier sends me a completed working machine!)

I have two questions:
1) does Finale27 actually use a GPU if you have one?
2) is a generic soundcard ideal for Finale ? – is it worth adding a Sound Blaster card?
(or am I making extra work for myself?)

A note on configuring hard ware.
(Apologies to those to whom this is all very obvious)

Many gaming sites let you configure a build. Typically one starts with a bottom end/'essential' gaming machine and add/subtract components as appropriate. The actual power of almost any CPU or GPU model is listed by pass mark (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php) but you need the complete model number. The powerful machine I'm borrowing right now has i7-8850 (PM: 10,468) and Quadro P1000 GPU(PM:4485) which provides excellent performance on the 4K monitor. 'Pass mark' tells me that an i3-10100F has a PM of 8872, and an iI5-10400F has a PM 12,445 (both common CPUs in bargain gaming machines) while the GPU of a bottom end gaming machine is often a Geforce GTX 1650 (PM: 7751).

I know other factors affect the performance – the speed and quality of the motherboard etc – but in a machine sold as a bundle one may reasonably expect folks to match those parts to the CPU/GPU. In addition 'pass mark' probably overrates machines with many cores - discussion on this forum suggest Finale is primarily single threaded! Is that true of Finale 27?

Interestingly, knowing just the i7, i5 or even i9 designation provides little indication of performance – my old machine had an Intel Core i7-840QM with a PM of 1922 - less than one quarter of a modern i3.
compostions at https://guitarcompositions.wordpress.com/


BuonTempi
Posts: 1297
Joined: Fri Aug 20, 2010 8:59 am
Finale Version: Finale 27
Operating System: Mac

Post by BuonTempi » Sat Jan 01, 2022 10:43 am

It's like asking "What sort of sports car do I need to carry my cake across town?" :lol: There's so many speed limits and traffic lights that the extra power offers no advantage.

Finale uses basic OS drawing routines to draw text, lines and curves. Its graphics requirements are very light, and it doesn't need to leverage GPU processing in any significant way. Obviously, a decent GPU will help pushing pixels around on a large monitor.

Finale's multi-core capabilities are also limited. As you point out, it uses a single thread for layout processing. For many years, it has maxed out a single core for playback, whether that is a 2006 Core 2 Duo or the latest multi-core i9.

I'd suggest that a high-end sound card is probably only necessary if you're going to plug in MIDI outputs and monitor speakers, but I'll defer to others' experience.

TonyEastwood
Posts: 60
Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2021 8:37 am
Finale Version: 27.0.0708
Operating System: Windows

Post by TonyEastwood » Mon Jan 03, 2022 5:58 pm

Thank you for the reply, it looks like I can skimp on the GPU to some extent - a Geforce GTX 1650 would probably stand 99% idle. A GT730 is much cheaper and will also stand idle 99% of the time (I hope :) ).

Running Finale on a very fast machine has been a revelation; many common activities , such as dragging about expression marks, fingerings etc, which were very 'sticky', suddenly flow naturally in real time. I'd hate to lose any of that and I'm not the sort of person who enjoys pulling PC's apart and pushing in new static sensitive components ....

Cake via sports car is definitely good and much fresher than cake via steam roller, especially over the 'vast expanse' of a 4K monitor :D
compostions at https://guitarcompositions.wordpress.com/

TonyEastwood
Posts: 60
Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2021 8:37 am
Finale Version: 27.0.0708
Operating System: Windows

Post by TonyEastwood » Mon Jan 03, 2022 6:33 pm

STOP PRESS

Finale does (indirectly) exercise the GPU. If you select and deselect large chunks of music and watch the windows report of GPU activity even on my machine I can get to 40% usage of a Quadro P1000 GPU(PM:4485). Expression drag also exercises it.

This should not really surprise me. In a former life I wrote VGA-device drivers and even in those far gone days I saw the OS would sometimes surprisingly capitalize on underlying hardware (e.g. VGA had a 'hardware' scroll.)
compostions at https://guitarcompositions.wordpress.com/

ttw
Posts: 171
Joined: Sat Nov 14, 2009 2:29 am
Finale Version: 27.4
Operating System: Windows

Post by ttw » Sat Feb 12, 2022 9:02 pm

I finally got my dual 4k monitors. Finale looks good but it's mostly limited by the program's programming and the internet over wire pair arrangement available.

For running my big Fortran codes, I opted for an HP OMEN 30L with 64GB memory, 2T SSD, 2T 7200rpm, 3070 card, some 11th gen cpu stuff and cooling. (Run from an 825 Logitech mouse-keyboard real cheap from Costco.)

My first attempt at building a big PC was canceled due to a lack of parts but I got a 10% discount on this one and a nice memory upgrade.

It all works well.

The dual monitors did work(maybe not in the newer versions) like I wanted. They could be one double-width Finale window, as two independent Finale screens, either on the same file or two Finale files or even a Finale file and a spider solitare game.

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