Brand new optimized PC laptop, crazy CPU !

[Janvier]

I know this has been asked a ton but I couldn't find an appropriate response in the forums.

I bought ableton, downloaded the latest version and it works perfectly with my 2007 iMac even with 100 tracks.
Many bugs but performance was great even with iTunes, Firefox, Transmission and a few other apps open at the same time as Ableton.

Now with my pc, only Ableton is running and terrible performance !
I recently bought a Clevo p170hm pc laptop:
Windows 7
120G SSD + 750GB 7500tr/min HDD
Intel i7-2630QM
8GB RAM

Clean install, updated drivers, optimized for best performance and CPU is at about 8% with an empty project.
I installed ASIO4all, that helped a bit but not enough to make it usable.

I start a new project, only 17 tracks and 70% CPU with crazy spikes >200% when I stop audio.
I even have drop outs with only one track a single synth playing one note !
I checked my real CPU usage, it was about 2% for one core when Ableton says 40%.

What can I do? Would switching to xp help?

[lotrian]

First, try with unactivated wifi card.
If that does not work, i think is it possible who that coming from your internal soundcard and Asio4all.
Try to run ableton with an external soundcard.

Good luck
Arnaud.

[Grant Carlisle]

Hmm...
Try reinstalling the sound card driver then reinstall asio4all. Sometimes it takes a couple installs of the sound driver and the asio driver for it to work right. Don't ask me why. I have and I3 2.13ghz with 8 gigs ram. I run a shit ton of stuff at the same time and only push about 63% on the CPU meter and that's using my on board sound card. I had a similar problem with the CPU pegging out after my last reinstall of the Win 7.
Here is what works best for my setup should be pretty close. Trust me a spent a lot of time configuring Asio to get the optimal sound without giving into delay/latency.
I hope this helps or at least gives you a starting point.


I'm sure that these setting might be wrong but they seem to be working. If anyone has any feed back feel free to let me know.

[dentaku]

You can also try getting dpclat.exe from http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml and seeing if you have any DPC latency problems.
Remember, ASIO4ALL is pretty much a hack (or workaround). I happens to work very well for most people but it's still not anything official like if you had a real audio interface with official ASIO drivers.

I would start disabling certain hardware and seeing what it could be that's causing the problems. I haven't had much trouble at all with Win7 64bit but I DID find out that one of the network adapters on my motherboard was messing with the performance of Live 8 so I disabled it and use the other one and it's fine now. It's a bit different with laptops of course.

[Janvier]

Thanks guys, I've tried all of your suggestions.
Disabling wifi didn't change anything, neither did the ASIO4ALL settings.
I've already ran DPC Latency checker and it is much to high, I'm used to seeing about 12-20µs latency, whereas I'm at 600-700µs, very surprising.

[twisted-space]

Probably a crappy driver, use this to discover what's causing your high DPC.

Does your machine have an nvidia gforce GPU? If so powermiser can cause high DPC spikes, I use powermiser switch to disable it when on mains power, (see this thread). Solved all my DPC latency issues problems.

[vicz]

We are Windose and all your RAM are belong to us!