Thanks again to all who took the trouble to help me… 
best to everyone.Kevin
will look into this…thanks
Great to see you got it all sorted!
what a difference a day makes eh… as they say lol…
Registry hacks can be fatal to the machine, and I can’t imagine Steinberg would recommend doing them to improve system performance. Could a Steinberg engineer come to this thread please and offer some less drastic suggestions please?
Intersting point 
throughout this whole thread not a sign of anyone from Steinberg… 
I asked a question regarding Mixbus 3 on their forum and the Boss himself answered 
so far it hasn’t proved fatal to my machine…got so used to re installing from the bottom up that it doesn’t really scare me anymore… 
cheers Mate…
There are no Registry Hacks, only registry settings
Not a problem at all if you know what you’re doing. You can always back up the registry before hand, or make notes of your changes (do not change “everything” at once though).
I also have some spiking audio stutter problem in Cubase 8.0.20, with even small projects (5% peak and 40% average ASIO load). It might have something with graphic card/driver, but I think you should be able to move your mouse without hickups.
Hunting down some plugins that might do it as we speak.
Glad you sorted it out
Look I am sorry if anyone else has mentioned this but do you use Kontakt? I do and have had spike and cpu issue on certain projects. Some people say that this is a hyper-threading issue. I am not so sure as it does not happen on every project. On those where it does happen disabling Kontakt solves the problem.
i can confirm this.
there are several instruments, especially those by NI themselves; huge CPU spikes occur, however nothing detrimental - playback is smooth; no clicks, pops etc… if i had not the meters open i would not have seen that and assumed all was well.
also, multi-threading on Kontakt is OFF.
I’m not sure if anyone suggested this, but what about starting Cubase in Safe Mode and seeing what the meters show?
Another question for Kevin is: When you start Cubase are the meters fine before you load the project in?
I don’t use Kontakt…cheers,
Hi, yes the meters are fine before I load a project…but the project that was the issue had one instance of Valhalla reverb,
all other plugins were cubase’s own…
two instrument tracks…Nexus and Trillion,
but it seems to be ok now after the registry thing…as I said earlier in the thread, the problem was always there on all projects but was not (to the best of my limited knowledge) affecting the actual performance…I just got sick of watching the meter full to the red all the time and wondered if I could do something about it…
anyway…the problem seems to be solved…
best, Kevin
Sounds like what you had was a graphics issue and the meter wasn’t showing you the truth due to the issue in graphics. Doing that regedit GraphicsAccelerater 0 thing makes sense here.
Well it’s good that you got it settled down now. For the record, myself and some others have had this where the meters were right off the charts with no project loaded in at all. That’s why I asked.
The last thing I was going to suggest, was that maybe the download files were corrupt, and should be freshly d’l’d, but no matter now.
Best of luck Kevin. You’re not the only one who’s had this.
Hi, actually when I did my 2nd ‘from scratch’ re install of everything (Windows 7 included) i did re download the files from the Steinberg download site in case there was a problem with the files…turned out just the same though…
cheers mate, Kevin
It’s very nice to hear about your issue being resolved.
I am genuinely glad that a resolution (or set thereof) has been reached. Likely, your thread will help other in similar situations, which is also happiness. Now, use that computer and make us a merry tune for a bit of a jig.
I have has the same problem with 3 macs system… now a total new mac "hakintosh’ high powered as can be & the same old glitch, Stutter etc
sigh… I have fixed it how ever with quite a few tweaks & the reg edit.
it doesn’t seem to matter how high powered the puter is when you put CP8 on it…(for some of us anyway) 
glad you sorted it…
It could very well be that there’s an issue with your system and that Cubase exposes those issues where Harrison MixBus (which is an 84MB installation file) doesn’t because it doesn’t put the same demands on your system. Your comparing apples to zebras when comparing Cubase to MuxBus.
I had HUGE issues with Cubase 7. I blamed Steinberg being that everything worked fine in 6.5. Turns out my Motherboard chipsets were the culprit and an upgraded replacement from the manufacturer cured all my ills. Never had those issues again and believe me they were severe show stoppers. Obviously the problem was caused by changes with Cubase that hit upon a flaw in my hardware.
You say you’ve done fresh installs and nothing fixes your problems…well if its a motherboard/hardware related issue then you can rebuild your OS 1000 times and nothing will improve. It’s hard to think that the problem could be on your end but if your unwilling to do some troubleshooting by replacing hardware then it’s not fair to blame Steinberg entirely. When it’s time to get a new computer… reinstall Cubase and let us know how it performs.