K3.5 with Cubase 5 on Windows 7/64 - SPIKES!

Hi there.

I've been running the following setup with Windows XP (32bit) for years with absolutely no problems with CPU spikes and such in heavier projects using K3.

Intel D975XBX motherboard
Intel Core2Extreme X6800
Seagate Barracuda harddisks, 7200 RPM
8 GB RAM
MOTU 828mkII @ 256 buffer size
UAD-1

I can play around 250-300 K3 voices for hours and hours without a single little glitch.

Recently I installed Windows 7/64bit, in order to be able to utilize all my RAM. Using the same hardware, same software (Cubase 5 32 bit), same projects, same settings, same everything that works flawless under Windows XP, gives me loads of random spikes even with low voice count when working with K3. It is pretty much unusable for me. I have done all the necessary tweaks (like disabling certain services and all that) but I still have issues. Can anyone help?

 

I would open up the Engine tab (left side of the Kontakt interface) to see if you can pinpoint what's overloading (e.g. CPU, disk, etc.)

 

Hi David! What exactly should I look for in there? I've already tried turning off multiprocessor support - made things even worse. I've also tried different settings of the CPU overload protection. No change....

In my XP system (that i still have on a separate disk) the settings are Multiprocessing: On (2 cores) and CPU overload protection: disabled. Works brilliant.

 

Possibly something is running in your new OS install that occupies the processor for too-large chunks of time now and then. I've used this tool:

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

to at least confirm the existence of something, then took potshots by looking at win7's list of services and turning things off until I found what was doing it (in my case, a network interface device driver install had also installed a network monitoring service that was causing glitches).

-glenn

 

Thank you Glenn. However, the DPC Latency checker shows no spikes whatsoever on my system. All green, and I get a maximum value of about 250 ms. Still, every now and then the ASIO Overload light will flash in Cubase. Especially when playing around 200 voices or more in K3.5. The ASIO meter won't go all the way to the top but stay at around 50% with the overload light flashing randomly.. I've literally tried everyting. Disabling every little tiny service that may cause it, disabling devices etc etc. Even done a BIOS update. Nothing seems to remove these spikes