With the drastic drop in prices for older CPU's I picked up an Intel Pentium-4 3.4GHz processor with 512Mb L2 cache and hyperthreading for $70. I though having hyperthreading would help speed things up over the 2.8GHz single core processor I had been using without hyperthreading. To my surprise everything I had previously recorded including anything new I recorded had terrible pop, clicks, distortion and slowdowns. I tried adjusting buffers but it didn't make any difference. Watching the CPU meter at the bottom of the screen it would sporadically jump up to peak CPU usage whenever I experienced the noise. After lots or trial and error I decided to try disabling the hyperthreading in the BIOS and it worked perfectly again. Using a buffer of 256 my CPU runs at an almost constant 20% max and my disk usage is staying below 10% running 16 channels simultaneously with effects.
Asus P4PE-X motherboard with 1006 BIOS
Intel Pentium-4 CPU 3.4GHz with 512KB L2 cache and hyperthreading
4GB DDR memory
2 PATA hard drives
GeForce FX5500 video card
4-Delta 44 sound cards (16 channels total)
2-Presonus 8-channel preamps
Sonar 5
post edited by mr. clean - 2012/02/19 14:07:30