I would be grateful for feedback, my 8 year old pc and cubase studio 4 worked flawlessly with zero latency on vocals and zero cpu spikes.
I upgraded to a high spec laptop, windows 8 and cubase 8 and have been struggling for weeks with CPU and latency issues. Also after 5 minutes with cubase the fan comes on, I eventually fix the latency and now am suffering form CPU spikes.
I thought my laptop would easily handle things so wanted to double check with those of you who are more experienced, anyhow at first glance could you please let me know if my laptop spec should easily handle cubase.
Thanks…
I use an external SSD for some of my libraries…
The laptop is a Dell XPS15 9530 and this is the spec…
338-BEFM 4th Generation Intel (R) Core ™ i7-4712HQ Processor (6M, up to 3.3GHz) 1 SR
16GB Dual Channel DDR3L 1600MHz (8GBx2) 1 SR
512GB Solid State Drive 1 SR
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2GB GDDR5 1 SR
Intel(R) Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 @ 5GHz + Bluetooth 4.0 1 SR
Spikes are a know but system specific problem. A lot of the new machines seem to have a prob with it, and it is not easy to solve since there are multiple possible culprits. It is also system specific. Some have it, others have no problem at all…
It’s definitly driver related. The spike is an indication that your audio driver is not receiving information in time. (thus it spikes)
You will probably notice that while the spike occurs, you still have plenty of processing power.
possible culprits:
check if it is caused by mouse movement. (a mouse can trigger popups or help menus when hovering over gui elements) (you can switch this off in preferences)
check if it the graphics driver (change your graphics driver to the intel graphics) You will see if this changes the behaviour or not
you can change the mouse scheme to inverted setting (that helped me in fact. It’s stupid, but it was a big difference (but it didn’t help with everybody)
check the usb slots and everything that is inserted there. (witch the dongle for example to another usb slot (USB2/3)
and so on… once you find the culprit… the problem is gone. But it’s a difficult one…
Dropouts can be hard to cure indeed.
I would try going into windows device manager and disabling all the stuff you can. On my HP elitebook I got rid of dropouts by disabling my wifi.