The clicks and dropout in Cubase occur even with just a project of one track, whether audio or Instrument. I also tried with ASIO High / Med/ Off and Steinberg Power on /off. Multiprocessing off is almost less clicky.
I don’t like to post this. I love Cubase, but I just thought the info might be useful.
I understand it seems to be linked to my system. But it’s only a problem for my system+ Cubase, no other DAW, nor graphics app nor Video editing app has this bottleneck problem on my system. Probably best to delete this thread.
I think you should leave it up. There’s folks here who are real good at debugging hardware problems (I’m not really one of them) and happy to offer suggestions. Like if you were on Cubase 11 instead of 12 it could be a bad USB port messing with your dongle - that would only impact Cubase.
Turning off every Intel service that I researched as unnecessary (ie, effectively every Intel service) seems to have stopped the audio dropout and regular peaking.
I’ll report back after a few days as one must always allow some time to confirm these things.