I'm on cubase 5 with a powerful pc, but even with this still tend to freeze each lane with it's vst's before moving onto the next lane.

I can load up a dozen soft synths but it's not ideal so again I tend to freeze these as I go.

Funnily enough I'm in the process of making a monster lead, lol, and have about 12 synths in a track and none are frozen yet, but I have them all going to one group track upon which all the FX are, rather than having fx inserted on each synth.

Also watch out for reverb as more than 2 gets stickey. I have one long and one short verb, to wit I set up sends to from instruments.

I tend to be at 24bit, 44.1 and I have the ASIO buffer on 1048 (cant recall the exact number).
I reduce the SIO latency setting to 224 (cant recall exact no again) on the occasion when I want to record an external synth and want no latency, or I even record at 1048 and then just manualy drag the audio to compensate for any timing lag after the recording is made.

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Ahh good stuff, cheers for that, i guess i should probably revert back to freezing, that should probably sort it out, just gets a bit awkward when i change my mind on a layer (which is all the time :P). I'll give the ASIO settings a go too and see how that works out, cheers

onboard soundcard..? if you're trying to use integrated motherboard sound to render VST's/effects it's probably struggling, having a powerful processor won't really help this.

If it has an ASIO driver you can try using larger buffer settings but if not you may want to look into some dedicated sound hardware - that's what it sounds like is the issue..

Also the vst's you mention that are loaded but not being used may still be using resources processing silence, make sure they'r bypassed or even better switched off.

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