If you are like me, and you are suddenly experiencing audio dropouts while recording in Cubase 10 or just audio in general on Windows itself, check your BIOS to see if C States is enabled. At least on my machine, an Intel Chipset, C States refers to the OS turning on and off processors to save power, and it’s a big deal for a continuous flow of data such as real time sound. I’m sure we all know this, but I had no idea that a new build of Windows 10 would re-enable C States in my BIOS. I happened to come across this while reading another post about Hyperthreading as I was looking for answers to this problem in this forum. I wanted to see if my BIOS supported turning on and off Hyperthreading, but I didn’t intend to do so, and I saw C States enabled in my BIOS. I have to say I was jumping for joy, because I was so frustrated trying to figure out what Windows 10 did to my DAW and Audio in general. I hope this helps somebody else who can’t figure this out. I feel kind of foolish not realizing this to begin with.
I always had C states enabled without any issues. But I guess it’s because if your system is from Skylake era or newer, the C states and turbo boost latency have drastically improved so it should no longer be an issue.
I have a Dell Precision laptop with an i9-9980HK (newer than skylake), and while I haven’t tested it in a while, I definitely needed to disable C-states in the BIOS in order to get reasonably dpc-latency-free performance in LatencyMon back in Nov/Dec when I was fighting with it. Granted, I’m heavily VSTi-focused and so need as small a buffer latency as I can possibly get, and dpc latencies that some would consider “minor” do cause audible glitching at low buffer settings. But the point is, at least in my case, disabling C-states made an audible and measurable (in LatencyMon) difference.