I recently installed Cubase PRO 8. everything was fine except for some random CPU spikes. they were specially noticeable while opening other programs or loading a webpage in chrome, for example
i read many posts, tried many things, changing drivers, configurations, disabling ASIO Guard, etc. finally what solved the issue for me is disabling the antivirus. eventually i uninstalled it. it was panda antivirus
i searched a lot for a solution and didn’t see nothing about this, so i hope this is useful for someone! 
Just wanted to say that I also experienced this same problem.
CPU would average 60-70% but would get burst of 100% every 30 seconds or so. Since I mixdown in real-time I actually couldn’t finish a mix as it kept aborting due to CPU spikes.
For me disabling Wi-Fi and closing a few background programs like spotify etc solved it.
Hi! In my case, i disabled my GPU and the problem seem solved, so far no pops or cracking sound after 2 recordings finger crossed
I am using this GTX 1050 GPU.
window 10
i7-8750H
16GB ram
Hi Kevin,
I have the same problem and the same GPU.
Can you please explain what “disabling GPU” means for you? What did you disable and where did you disable it? Something in Windows? Something in Cubase? Any details are welcome.
Thanks!
Dennis