Cubase 13 und 14 pro & ASUS Vivobook

Hello everyone,
I have a new Vivobook with AMD processor and Radeon grafics. I don’t think it needs more detail, CPU, RAM and harddrive should be more than enough to run my Cubase project … only they are not.

I mostly record acoustic instruments and vocals. I am working on a 15 track recording right now. 5, 6 plug ins on the tracks and Cubase crackles, stops, jumps and makes it really hard to work with.

ASIO Guard hovers round 30%, Realtime round 1,5% and peak is in the lowest tenth. Disc cache shows zero load.

I am working with Ymaha digital desk (Yamaha Steinberg ASIO driver), UAD, Antelope and internal sound device (Steinberg inbuilt ASIO driver) - same things happening everytime.

While recording what happens most: sound drops out, the track I am recording on shows no waveform animation anymore. Then after some little time, sometimes only half a second, sometimes two or more seconds everything goes back to normal. The recording has no dropout, but of course if the playback stops suddenly for a sec or two most singers and musician will stop and be confused what’s happening.

Last weekend I recorded a session, playback jumped back or forward half a sec or so regularly.
Crackles in the recording, on all tracks, all in the same place.

I have already uninstalled every WIN11 feature I could uninstall, deactivated defender, deactivated wireless adapter, made sure all drivers are up to date …etc.

I almost feel like back in 2007 when such things were a thing, but I haven’t had problems like this in a very long time.

Can anyone here help me find a solution? Because if not, I will say goodbye after 29 years to either cubase or windows or both …

I think folks are expecting English in the English forum :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Thanks for the Gary Larson :slight_smile:
I was confused and thought I was in the German forum. Have translated to English now

1 Like

Language mixup when replying

Is it an SSD hard drive or a “standard” magnetic laptop drive? I don’t know how you’ve got that Yamaha digital desk integrated, but I’m presuming the audio files reside on the laptop itself ? Have you tried creating a test project localizing the audio files to an external SSD (if you do indeed have a non-SSD hard drive)? Just curious.

check your system with LatencyMon.
See also here where they checked a Vivobook with LatencyMon and did identify issues with the realtime audio.

Depending on the model you can run into problems. Which one do you have?
I’m just thinking about getting a Vivobook S16 with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, but I’m in doubt because of the possible audio realtime problems.

I never thought of checking. It says it`s a flash drive, is that what you mean by magnetic?

I have started testing the system using an external HHD via USB 2 … really slow connection to see if that changes anything. Thxs!!

Cubase performance meter does NOT register any audio drop outs btw …
I also tried different ASIO guard settings, disabling it altogether, low, normal and high … makes no difference.

My prcessor is a Ryzen 7
I checked with Latency Mon several times, and like 50% of the time it gives green light and 50% it detects issues with the

  1. network connect driver
    plus
  2. some other unidentified drivers that result in throttling of the CPU
    The solution given is disable CPU throttling in BIOS or WIN
    In BIOS there is no way of doing this, there is no setting I can edit in there.
    In WIN I am not sure how to do it or even if this would be a solution.

The most offensive drivers seem to be
dxgkrnl.sys which is a graphics driver,
ntoskrnl.exe which is something to do with WIN kernel
and
wdf01000.sys another WIN thing I don’t know what it does but seems to be offender quite often.

According to Latency Mon a lot is happening on CPU 0 like ten to twenty times higher Interrupt cycle time, ISRs are happening only on CPU 0 and 1, …
I am not sure how to interpret these numbers, but I wonder why everything is happening on CPU 0 only.

See below Latency Mon result:
Index ; Group& no; Interrupt cycletime; ISR count; Highest ISR execution; DPC count; Highest DPC execution; Driver with highest execution

CPU 0 0, 0 94,255768 400749 2890811 0,114549 0,754960 dxgkrnl.sys
CPU 1 0, 1 7,633388 1582 6212 0,037675 0,322535 dxgkrnl.sys
CPU 2 0, 2 9,438509 0 11349 0,0 0,090711 ntoskrnl.exe
CPU 3 0, 3 6,767231 0 6258 0,0 0,133016 ntoskrnl.exe
CPU 4 0, 4 9,987724 0 14976 0,0 0,085611 ntoskrnl.exe
CPU 5 0, 5 9,501942 0 15347 0,0 0,119770 ntoskrnl.exe
CPU 6 0, 6 8,904317 0 11679 0,0 0,113858 ntoskrnl.exe
CPU 7 0, 7 8,788871 0 8014 0,0 0,084489 ntoskrnl.exe
CPU 8 0, 8 10,41690 0 27169 0,0 0,133267 CLASSPNP.SYS
CPU 9 0, 9 10,500422 0 24632 0,0 0,100511 ntoskrnl.exe
CPU 10 0, 10 7,047642 0 4441 0,0 0,081423 ntoskrnl.exe
CPU 11 0, 11 7,407750 0 3948 0,0 0,095140 ntoskrnl.exe
CPU 12 0, 12 13,732650 0 43101 0,0 0,449850 ntoskrnl.exe
CPU 13 0, 13 32,160346 0 66705 0,0 0,606703 ntoskrnl.exe
CPU 14 0, 14 21,695887 0 63709 0,0 0,413236 ntoskrnl.exe
CPU 15 0, 15 22,311003 0 44911 0,0 0,461483 ntoskrnl.exe

Well, the “flash drive” would typically be an external USB thumb drive. By “magnetic” I meant a SATA-style “hard drive” as opposed to a SSD. I was actually suggesting the external storage test be done with something like a USB3/TB and a high-speed SSD drive - not sure a slow USB2 HDD is going to help you make a determination.

You’re most likely going to have to just run though different series of tests to see how well your hardware performs under different project loads. Also, that directX system driver doesn’t only refer to graphics, but audio as well. You might check your ASIO drivers and configuration in that regard, but folks using CB on Windows could help more than I.

I was a little hesitant to buy an AUSU Vivobook because of possible latency issues… (see the link above).
I took the risk and bought an ASUS Vivobook S15 with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, 1TB SSD, 32 GB RAM on discount to have a mobile variant compared to my 6 years old desktop.
It works quite well for me. It’s about 25% faster than my desktop (compared to the same projects running on both systems).
I use it with a Steinberg UR28M.
I tried the scenario like @room66 described above. No issues found on my side.
I know, this does not help room66, but might give some inside to people who want to buy a Vivobook or similiar.