y OS harddrive is all by itself on a Velociraptor 10K RPM HDD.  Blazing fast, clean and stable.  It houses only my OS and program files, nothing more. All my VST and plugins

If he only has his OS and Sonar program on his Velociraptor (the Velociraptor has up to 120/120MB/s read/write) I dont this his bottleneck would be the Velociraptor. 


I would have checked the core balance, as "tomixornot" are saying. 

I have this problem too, 1st core in the red whilst others hover around 20 percent. Use to be fine in X1d win7 64bit but since X2(a) win 8 64 bit its not working well at all. No use me saying this i know, just that you aren't alone. Thread scheduling model setting makes no difference for me, hopefully it will work for you. Will watch this thread with interest. Good Luck Bibs

If anyone has a problem with Core 1 maxing out, there was a thread about it in October of 2011.
Pay attention to Post #5, as how to change settings in Power Options.
Only after I did this that my cores are more evenly spread out now. 

Basically it emphasizes the point that we should set
. Minimum Processor State: change to 100%
. Maximum Processor State: change to 100%.
 
The registry edit never did anything for me as well for others.

http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=2409875

dan le

Okay Everyone.. time for the update.  After trying every step outlined in the above threads to avoid having the Core 1 max out, nothing helped me.  I tried it all it seems and my system was still maxing out on the first core long before the others even came close.

Finally, I've decided to just bite the bullet and upgrade my RAM and my CPU.  And instead of pussy-footing around with incremental changes, I've opted to just max out my motherboard's capabilities. What a freakin' difference!!

Now, I do realize that the attached images show 100% MIDI tracks with multiple effects.  I am aware I can ease the CPU load by freezing tracks, bouncing down to audio files, using more sub busses, etc, etc.  But I am using this example deliberately to get my original CPU to tap out.

Fifteen bars into the composition, that Core 1 slams up into the red.  

1. This is the original CPU (i7 920 2.66 gHz) with 12GB of RAM.






Today I upgraded my CPU and RAM.


2. This is the new CPU (i7 980x Extreme Edition 3.33 gHz) with 24GB of RAM.




Same project, approximately the same capture on the timeline during playback.  Major difference!!  Plus, it's so nice to now see 12 virtual cores showing up in the CPU meter in Sonar X2 vs the previous 8.  Interesting how Sonar rearranged that top info area to make room for the new CPU and performance meter.  So yes, that first core of the new 12 is still taxed more than the others... but I've got plenty of headroom yet to go!

Hopefully I'm not going to be slamming up into the red ANYTIME soon now!  Thanks everyone for all the input and advice on this subject.  

Something else to look into with the i7 is try disabling Speed Step in the BIOS. I had a similar issue with core one maxing out. It got worse after I disabled core parking. Anyway, killing Speed Step (CPUEIST is how it may show) evened things out for me a lot.

emwhy


Something else to look into with the i7 is try disabling Speed Step in the BIOS. I had a similar issue with core one maxing out. It got worse after I disabled core parking. Anyway, killing Speed Step (CPUEIST is how it may show) evened things out for me a lot.

@emwhy - Where did you go to disable your core parking?  I should go check that setting myself.  Thanks for the tip about the Speed Step. I'll give that a go too.  While I'm really happy with the new upgrades, I'd like to get as much as I can out of it.  Thanks for the reply!

Core Parking: http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=1861804

As for Speed Step, it depends on your Mobo manufacturer. I see you have an Asus, so it should be in the BIOS. Some boards don't allow that option (Dells, HP, etc). 

@emwhy - Thank you Good Sir, I shall take a look tonight into this.

** it seems as though I made a mistake in terminology earlier, and confused parking with unparking** 
This is how my post SHOULD have read:

So I looked into the parked cores in the OS and SpeedStep settings in the BIOS.  It seems I did already unpark my cores earlier when trying to even-out the cores' processing load in Sonar.  My SpeedStep was enabled all along.

I parked my cores and disabled SpeedStep.  My results were worse.  I tried mixing and matching between the unparking and the SpeedStep.  It seems that unparking my cores is a must for me.  The SpeedStep thing didn't seem to net consistent results.. so just I left it enabled since the majority of the time it made a slight difference for the better.

Thanks again emwhy for the info.

This is an old thread, but I'd enjoy hearing anyone else's thoughts or results with Speed Step enabled / disabled.