Jim's boxes are the very best. And mine came ready to rock. It was only the last few iterations of Sonar that I noticed this happening. Maybe Jim can chime in with the straight skinny...but I have never had a better DAW than the one he built for me. Period.

Core parking can be very bad news indeed on a DAW. As can various cpu CE sleep/power saving modes normally set in the bios which work by partially throttling the cpu. No problem in Word or Photoshop or most games, but bad news on a system that needs real time response and can't hang around for a few hundred miliseconds while cores are broought up tp speed.

Like CakeAlex I disabled it in Windows 7 but have not yet on windows 8.1. If needed on hyperthreaded systems or systems with more that 4 cores it could be benificial depending on your usage of course.
 
If it helped then that's great. 

This was an issue with win7 when the 8cores came out,there are two fixes you can download from Microsoft you need both,after you run them they essentially do what's being described here without actually dabbling in your registrys.windows 8 supports the 8 core amd chips were 7 doesn't you shouldn't need to mess with it in 8 unless you actually have issues.

johnnyV
What I don't get is that you bought a custom DAW computer and still had to tweak it. Doesn't Jim offer excellent support ?  I have heard so from most folks? 

We disable CPU Core Parking.
In fact, we just built Noel Borthwick's new DAW.
Ask him how it's performing...    
 
We built OurOlPal's machine a good while ago.
Not sure how CPU Core Parking was (re)enabled.
 
If any client has an issue, they're always welcome to contact us for support.
 
 

As I said Jim, ol pal.  Your DAWs are the best things goin!!  But it is weird because this problem didn't crop up until early last year and has seemed to get worse since.  Could a Win update or some such have done it??  In any case I'm back to hot straight and normal now.  But I'll keep ya posted as to ongoing results.  I probably should have emailed you directly before mucking about but I didn't want to pester wart ya:-)
 
 

fwrend

Not sure this is the thread but another forum member posted this website and core parking utility:

http://www.coderbag.com/p...u-core-parking-utility

I have done neither so proceed at your own risk.

Just used the coderbag utility that fwrend linked above and it worked like a charm. All of my CPUs were indeed parked. I do see an improvement overall.  Great thread and great tips from everyone!

You should also change the threading model in Sonar.
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/1982770
 
The core parking may cause clicks or pops while the parked core is started but the threading model controls how Sonar distributes the load among the cores.

 Bittersweet to see a ba_midi post.

yorolpal
One anomaly I've noticed since making the change and listening back to several large projects is that sometimes the first core will "load up" as the song progresses. Not like it used to...but noticeably. If I stop playback at that point and start playback again it goes back down. Weird.

I did it and it works for me. I HATE seeing that one core going up high and the others are very low. New projects seem to work fine but a few older projects were Core 0 was really peaking still get higher than new projects. I don't get it but I saw it happening. It never was a problem in X1 but it got noticeable in X2. No opinion, just an observation.