Is it safe to say that generally speaking Audio dropout is cause by lack of PC resources?
 
tia
meh

Generally speaking, yes. But not always.
 
Dropouts can also occur as a result of competition for resources. For example, wireless network cards and video drivers are notorious for assuming nothing else going on in the computer is more important than them. In rare instances, dropouts can be a symptom of faulty or failing hardware, such as weak spots on a disk drive or an interface constantly signalling interrupts.
 

Well said Bitflip.
I was going to mention exactly what you did.
VC are notorious for issues but I have also seen HD's on their last sandwich causing problems.

I once had a case where an NVidia graphics driver interfered with the Firewire port. It sounded like audio glitching (and it was) but it was caused by latency effects on the firewire protocol, not anything to do with audio resources.
 
It was then that I discovered how NVidia drivers affected LatencyMon measurements and I collected 5 or 6 differently dated drivers to find the best for audio - it was several release back that had the better results.
 
If you run latencymon and see some DPC process using more than about 1 ms, that process could interfere with audio output.
 
In the Windows 10 forum recently, one fellow reported latency very high for the SCSI port driver that was probably interfering with his audio.
 
We never figure the cause for that one, though.

DPC Latency is occurring very often which can be caused by inferior drivers, running power saving options and a lot of other reasons. DPC stands for Deferred Procedure Call. This effect is not only is noticed when you use your DAW but also when you play a You Tube video or simply Windows Media player. The sound will have kinds of dropouts. The cause is very system based and often related to Network / Wifi drivers. The first thing you can do is disable Wifi/network drivers. In a lot of cases this will help, if not the big search comes.
 
Good luck
Jan

I don't know but Ableton Live never dropped out on my even under the heaviest load, whereas I'm fighting serious dropouts in Sonar with a very mild project.
 
So, I would argue it's not always system resources...

At the risk of hijacking this thread (let me know if I should move it to another thread),
 
In an effort to declutter and consolidate I've gotten rid of 2 desktop machines and an old laptop and bought a brand new Dell XPS 13, 16GB RAM and a 500GB SSD hard drive running Windows 10. I'm using a Behringer U-Phoria UMC404HD USB Audio interface.
 
I've uinstalled McAfee, killed Dropbox, One Drive and suspended Carbonite. I have uninstalled all the Dell support stuff that came on the machine.
 
I've installed Sonar X1 and loaded up some of my old projects that ran fine on a very old desktop machine.
 
The Audio Engine will stop immediately when I try to play any of my larger projects. I opened up a very simple project that just had 2 guitar tracks and the playback is horrible, very warbly.
 
I can't believe the resources on this machine are taxed to the point that Sonar cannot perform at all. I'm sick thinking that I just threw away $1500 on what I thought was a killer laptop that should last me for years.
 
I'm hoping there's just some configuration work I need to do to salvage this.
 
Thanks in advance for any help,
 
Greg.

have you installed the drivers for your Behringer Audio interface ?

I'm a longtime SONAR use ( back to ProAudio 7 actually) so I'm not trying to be a hater when I mention this...
but I've usually had fairly robust machines..not the latest greatest but not sh*t either. 
I'm sometimes frustrated when I have a project with 15-20 pure audio tracks and maybe 4 or 5 soft synths and do a quick edit while the transport is running ( maybe slip edit a clip or delete a portion) and SONAR can still cough it up and dropout. Maybe I expect too much, but it always feels like I SHOULD be able to do those things on the fly without SONAR dropping out. It's really the only thing that ever makes me look over to the dark side and consider switching.
Again..love it in general, but it does seem dropout prone. 
(PS...my current build is lean and tests well with Prime95 and latency mon...still get more dropouts than I think I should....)

Well, my machine is 6 years old and running networking, antivirus, and all the standard background stuff, I can record video live running 20 tracks of Maschine 2 projects.
 
48 Khz, 64-bit audio, WASAPI (needed for Camtasia recording).
 
Without recording video and using ASIO I can get 25 tracks with no dropouts.
 
http://www.arachnaut.net/...0Maschine2projects.avi