Computer setup, CPU spiking, and how the hell do I know what is causing it...

Drew_TNBD

Hey dudes,

So a few videos first:
Some audio tracks with no effects: http://screencast.com/t/nyQoeCzYddxr
BFD3 and audio tracks, all with additional effects: http://screencast.com/t/dxQwUUSa1zx

My system:
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD3P-B3, Intel P67
CPU: Intel Core i7-2600K 3.40 GHz, Sandybridge
CPU cooler: Scythe Mugen 2 Quiet CPU Cooler
RAM: 8GB (2x4GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR3

I'm experiencing these erratic glitches in Studio One and Cubase Elements 8 as well. I don't think I am getting it in Reaper, but I haven't cloned a project over to fully confirm this yet. Just a few audio tracks.

I am running Windows 10, but I have had Windows 7 and Windows 8 on this machine and it's been up and running since 2011. I have had these erratic glitches since I built the machine. I never had this issue on my old Q6600 based machine.

Now whilst this isn't utterly destroying my experience when recording and mixing, it is massively distracting. I can't get through a project without raising my buffers. I experience audio glitches and dropouts with only a few tracks, and I don't have confidence in my system.

I am looking for some advice - should I change my motherboard? Could that be the problem? If so, what motherboard should I get?

If it isn't the motherboard... what can I do to cure this? It happens with Firewire cards, USB cards, and I used to have an RME Hammerfall PCI card, and it did it then too.

I don't want to blame Studio One necessarily, because this does not seem to be a wide experience with the userbase. It's certainly something to do with my system, I am just not sure what.

Jalapeno

Could well be the performance of the device drivers under Windows 10 - there's a noble track record of MS cocking things up at major windows releases (XP to 7, completely banjaxed me re: audio & video drivers).

Are your device drivers specifically tested and supported for W10 ?

I'm holding back on W10 until I'm absolutely sure it's all fixed as I don't want all the IT nause again.

Drew_TNBD

Well as I say, I've had this issue since Win7. But MOTU who make my soundcard say that it's signed off for Windows 10. I've got a Roland Octa Capture coming tomorrow, but I expect the same performance. I've got a couple of other soundcards here too, and they all exhibit the same issue.

I also tried my MOTU on my Asus laptop (Win10) as well... same issue.

Friend at the office tried to reproduce my issue on a 4th gen i7 machine, and he couldn't reproduce the spiking.

It's a weird one for sure!

JezWynd

...

Jalapeno

Like I said inexplicable Audio IT nause - kills creativity.

I won't say it's easier on Apple .... 'cos it ain't in my experience - trying to get lag-less concurrent playback & record has been a nightmare.

ecc83

Just a couple of ideas.

Video is very ram hungry. 8G SHOULD be fine but there is always the possibility that one stick is faulty, you should be able to download a memory test program from the mnfctrs.

"DPClat" is a little app that can run and tell you when the system is spiking. Cannot tell you what is doing it (love such an app is there is one!) so it is just trial and error.

Naturally you have turned of stuff like OBS, bloops, wireless and virus checkers?

Dave.

TTony

I've had apparently random and undiagnose-able faults with PCs before that have eventually been resolved by changing the PSU.

Easier, cheaper and quicker to swap in a quality PSU than it is to change the mobo.

[edit]

Just watched the video, and you've got a lot of background processes running.  I'd take a look at those first, before blaming the hardware.  Disconnect the machine from the network and stop all / any anti-virus (etc) background processes.  Kill stuff that's will periodically fire up and run (without your invitation to do so).  Bonjour & Google Crash Handler, Dropbox ...

Maybe have a separate machine just for the music, and keep the rest of your life on a separate box?

sweepy

Precisely why I moved to a Mac for music making, it's not a Mac v PC thing, both machines have their merits for different uses, but the PSU is a strong possibility and often overlooked

spark240

I use S1-3 on a Mac with 16G ram, this does seem to help, and I definitely don't get that issue you have.

I do have to record at 64 buffer but playback / mix at 512 ( I think thats right ! )

 

   

Danny1969

Generally a PSU issue will cause games and other heavy loads to crash, it's normally caused by the caps going faulty, leaking and the the rails dipping under what they should be. But sometimes the caps on the board, especially the heavy current low volts ones near the CPU will exhibit the same fault and symptoms 

You prob know this but with any audio PC disable the all  nics in device manager, have no anti virus running, no Windows update, no office fast find or iTunes \ Adobe updaters ect. Take everything out if the startup. I use Studio 1 for live processing with Presonus digital mixers and as far as I can tell the softwares good and reliable 

Jalapeno

Danny1969 said:

Generally a PSU issue will cause games and other heavy loads to crash, it's normally caused by the caps going faulty, leaking and the the rails dipping under what they should be. But sometimes the caps on the board, especially the heavy current low volts ones near the CPU will exhibit the same fault and symptoms 

You prob know this but with any audio PC disable the all  nics in device manager, have no anti virus running, no Windows update, no office fast find or iTunes \ Adobe updaters ect. Take everything out if the startup. I use Studio 1 for live processing with Presonus digital mixers and as far as I can tell the softwares good and reliable 

And on-board (mobo) sound interface disabled, and turn off all the UI features like ghosting moves etc.

PolarityMan

there must be some way to work out what is responsible, process explorer or something must have something that can measure cpu use down to user space / kernel time per process.

On unix I'd then use something like systrace to try to work out what's going on.

Clarky

I don't know about a PC, but on a Mac it can be because the RAM is exhausted.

I used to have this prob with BFD2 and / or when I ran songs in Logic that had heavy duty AU's in it.

the solution is more RAM

years ago I upgraded to 16G and then started getting the prob again a short while ago when I started messing with trailer music [cos it's a huge orchestra, male and female choir, metal band, synths, and all sorts of extras..

now I'm up at 32G of RAM the prob has gone.

the cause is because there's not enough RAM to load the samples and run everything else..

the CPU's then have to work extra hard to handle all the hard-drive page-outs that are happening because the hard drives are helping to compensate for the exhausted RAM.

when this happens you get audio glitches, bad latency and other general agro..

Heartfeltdawn

Right, so running Windows 10 and you've had Windows 7 and 8 on there. When is the last time you did a completely clean installation? 

ecc83 mentions DPC Latency Checker by Thesycon. Sadly this works fine on Windows 7, won't run properly on Windows 8 as they explain on the link above, and may well be the same for Windows 10. 

So zip over to Resplendence and check out LatencyMon. That will tell you where some of the potential problems may lie. 

With regard to machine setup, the thigns that made the major difference to my AMD FX-4 6300 Windows 7 box:

-power plan set to high performance

-no updates (I don't use AV software)

-turn off as much as possible on the motherboard (eg. I turn off Firewire as I don't use it)

-update the motherboard BIOS

-huge thing for my system was upgrading the NIC software to the latest version. Took out a regular spike in the system. 

Focusrite give a good basic guide. Gearslutz has a load of things on there that you can really get in depth with and users there frequently refer to Black Viper's optimization guides. His Windows 10 guide is here. 

Stuff like core parking, C1E, Speedstep requires longer reading, I'm afraid. Although the Youtube video below is something I hadn't done and am now trying. 

Heartfeltdawn

Definitely have a go with Reaper. I was actually getting some glitches using the demo of Studio 1 last month that I wasn't getting from Reaper or Audiomulch. 

Do you have a separate graphics card or onboard graphics? 

Have a browse through that if you haven't already.

http://presonus.zendesk.com/entries/203607-optimizing-windows-vista-7-power-settings-for-studio-one

Drew_TNBD

Hey guys,

I appreciate the tips.

- Powerscaling options like C1E and EIST are all disabled in my bios.
- I have a GTX 650ti graphics card. It's no slouch of a card, but isn't ultra high-end.
- I do only have 8gb of RAM. Maybe that is something I could look at addressing, and it would be quite cheap to do so.
- Someone on KvR said that perhaps I haven't applied the thermal paste very well and that's why I am seeing spikes? It's a possibility.
- I do have a fair few background processes running, but most of them are very low impact. I don't expect that disabling them will stop the CPU spiking issue, it just might lower the overall CPU usage. But the spiking will still be there imho.
- My Win10 installation was an upgrade, so yeah maybe I could start all over again.

Clarky

idea: in your DAW can you 'freeze' tracks [if so, I've no idea what your DAW would call it]?

in Logic, there's a Freeze feature which can be switched on for all track types [audio / AU etc]..

when you next hit 'play', Logic will record the frozen track as audio [freeze file]

when you next hit 'play' Logic will play the frozen track's freeze file audio instead of devoting all the CPU / RAM / DSP etc horse power to it as it would under normal conditions..

what this then does is to effectively disable the AU instrument and all fx plug-ins [fx only for audio tracks] and play a WAV file instead....

the intention is that this recovers CPU / RAM / etc to provide better performance..

and when you want to edit the track, you hit the freeze button again and everything reverts to normal..

some of my trailer pieces are 100+ tracks with some pretty CPU / RAM hungry instruments.. the freeze feature really helps me under these more extreme conditions..

and my lil Mac is so much nicer to hang out with when it's not working it's lil' tits off...

Cabicular

it sounds like a DMA conflict

try taking out all but essential cards (i.e. the audio interface one and graphics)

if it still happens try moving them to different slots

We used to get this loads with firewire cards in the 01x i88x days at Yamaha

Jalapeno

This is why I switched to a USB interface.

 Every release was a new journey of buffer settings and experimental drivers - things haven't really improved since the later stages of the XP era - which in the end was pretty stable - I could record video on a webcam (without having to edit the AV after to realign sync) while doing audio playback. 

Drew_TNBD

Cabicular said:

it sounds like a DMA conflict

try taking out all but essential cards (i.e. the audio interface one and graphics)

if it still happens try moving them to different slots

We used to get this loads with firewire cards in the 01x i88x days at Yamaha

Did you used to work for Yamaha?

I will try and move some stuff around. From what I recall all I've got in there: Graphics card, Firewire card (which isn't in use tbh!)

My soundcard is a USB2 one.

Jalapeno

Make sure the USB card is plugged into a dedicated controller on the Mobo, not a shared one.