I know I’m coming late to the party, but this message might be useful also for Cubase 11 users (like I am).
I was dealing with the same totally non sense problem and tried everything: disabling unused programs, disabling ASIO guard, multiprocessing, increasing Audio device buffer. Nothing worked for me, and note: I’m on a Lenovo Extreme, with Intel i9 and 32 gigs of RAM, so you can imagine my frustration when I read “it’s a power problem”, it simply can’t be.
Guess what, like someone wrote above in the thread the video card have a lot to do with this mess. Since this is a “new generation” laptop with double video card, an NVidia Geforce super powerful dedicated card and an Intel integrated one.
Out of the box in the default setup, every app you launch (Cubase and Superior included) runs on the Nvidia card, but there’s a way to prevent this by looking into the NVidia control panel. In my case I changed in the “Manage 3D settings”:
Global Settings tab → Preferred graphics processor → Integrated graphincs
I also changed under “Configure Sorround, Physx”:
PhysX settings → CPU
Magically, after this, no more clicks, I re-enabled Multiprocessor, no clicks, I re-enabled ASIO guards, no clicks, and so I was able also to decrease the buffer size to 256 samples.
To add more context, I find out that having an external monitor attached (in my case via HDMI) makes you unable to run applications on the Intel GPU (it forces the NVidia GPU usage, otherwise the external monitor will not work).
This is clearly an operating system/hardware problem, I saw that a new BIOS is available for my Laptop (Lenovo X1 Extreme), and I will give it a try.
Here I am again, with no good news. It was true that by using the video card as explained above, I got no clicks or dropouts, but I didn’t consider the timings: after two minutes, the situation is quite the same as before.
I started working with the latencymon software, to have an objective value, and at first, it confirmed the behavior of my laptop: after 30 seconds/1 minute, it started alerting about the dropouts and cpu throttling.
This last thing is the real bad guy. The way these new laptops manage that factor is a nightmare, and to be 100% sure I’,ve tried 3 different models: results are the same.
I made a lot of tries with almost everything, then I mitigated, but not resolved, with this:
I’ve used the integrated video card for all the applications (so Cubase, US20x20 mixer, and Superior drummer);
I’ve disabled the Wi-Fi (so airplane mode, this counts a lot);
With all of this in place, latencymon alerted for the problem after 4 minutes. So it is a reasonable time to make a recording, but far from being ideal. I just surrender to the fact that having a Windows modern laptop working well as a DAW it’s almost impossible. It’s not a matter of Cubase, it’s a Windows and hardware producer’s fault (I tried both Lenovo and Dell). What is worse is that by clicking around, a huge amount of users came to the same conclusion, just google a bit for “Windows laptop ACPI latency” and you’ll see by yourself.
Got the same annoying problem since years with all cubase versions on my laptop and my really good desktop-pc. The only thing that helps on my desktop-pc is to deactivate “multicore / hyperthreading” in the cubase studio configuration settings. Funny thing - heavy synths like DIVA now only takes about 5-10% instead of 30-40% of cpu-usage. Really weird…
My buffer is now set to maximum and I still get drop outs in a blank project with no audio playing. I do not want to disable my graphics card as I do a lot of video work. If I disable my wi-fi the problem seems to go away, but this is not a problem when I test version 7.5. I like to have wi-fi running in the background, I know I should be focused on my music but I like the freedom to multi-task.
I don’t know what hyper threading is but I feel that I shouldn’t have to reconfigure my computer. Before it gets to that day where I have to uninstall everything for Cubase to work, I have to make a stand.
This problem seems to only effect some computers, Does Steinberg know the PC specifications or does Cubase require system changes to work without random spikes? a guide on how to make changes is not in the manual.
Does anyone know if this problem has been fixed in Cubase 11? Maybe I should upgrade.
This is the reason people specifically buy and use a computer as a DAW only. You know the answers but you don’t want to do anything about it. These are widespread problems and wi fi is definitely one of those. I always used wired as wi fi interferes with all sorts. You can’t expect steinberg to try and cater for this. To be honest I don’t think they could anyway. Streaming audio multichannel and vsti is a very specific task that requires a lot of real time processing. For this reason it is not compatible with settings you may want for other programs. What about using another partition and dual boot?
Steinberg can’t design Cubase for every motherboard/cpu/memory combination. There are too many variables. I have a new and 12 year all pc and both work faultlessly but I got the purely for audio and researched the components that were known to be good.