I know, it's been answered a thousand times:
- A good ASIO driver matters more than the hardware
- It's your CPU and rest of the system, not the audio card / box
 
I'm a kind of guy that doesn't like limitations when I want to be creative. I got my PC maxed out, 8-Core Ryzen@4Ghz, 32GB DDR4 3000, 1TB SSD, Windows 10 fresh and clean. What's left from old ages is my M-Audio Delta 44, latest driver is from 2012.
 
I'm starting to wonder if that old piece of gear is part of the problem I'm having from time to time, high latency, dropouts if a plugin hits more than 50% load on a single core...
 
I don't really care about inputs and outputs, got a separate preamp for recording (which I hardly do anyway).
What's the best and least expensive interface for operating in-the-box, lots of VSTs and VSTis / CPU demanding ones?
 
BTW: Sonar even in the non-platinum version is balancing the CPU load nicely, devs get my respect for that. Multithreading never is an easy business.
 

According to our "resident guru" who builds DAW PC's (on a commercial basis) and has done testing with Ryzen, his findings are its great for Gaming and not so great for audio production.  Latency problems is one thing he pointed out.

fireberd
According to our "resident guru" who builds DAW PC's (on a commercial basis) and has done testing with Ryzen, his findings are its great for Gaming and not so great for audio production.  Latency problems is one thing he pointed out.

I don't know, this is a very generic statement. The web is full of "Ryzen is bad for gaming" "Ryzen is great for gaming" blabla... pretty much all of them lack any sort of relation. It's better than what CPU? Worse than what?
 
The Ryzen 7 are almost on par with a 6900k in pretty much any discipline, if you never had your hands on one of either CPUs you can't really image the power your machine has. It's like a rage mob of VW drivers argue about Ferrari vs McLaren, and why one of them is "so bad".
 
When I was talking about dropouts and latency I meant in an more "extreme" scenario, e.g. I can run 8 instances of Falcon (Multisynths, Granular, IRCAM, all kinds of FX) + 8 instances of Iris 2, top em all of with Neutron on every channel + more FX, some plugins on the master channel. No real issues. Most people with their McBookPro whatever probably would have bounced long ago.*
 
But there're scenarios when I'm not happy and think the systems could potentially do better. I was wondering if my audio card with it's old driver could be involved.
 
*For fun I made a performance test yesterday night, 32 instances of Falcon + 32 instances of Iris 2, all loaded with different instruments + Neutron on every channel (EQ + 1x Compressor) were too much for my system. I had to reduce the number of instances to 24xFalcon and 24xIris 2 to get a stable situation at an ASIO buffer size of 1024. That's neither meant as complaint nor as blatancy, just as information where I'm at. This also wasn't really my concern as I tried to express, it's more situations of single plugins like Falcon going the CPU spike trail and basically killing all of my audio.

I'm starting to wonder if that old piece of gear is part of the problem I'm having from time to time, high latency, dropouts if a plugin hits more than 50% load on a single core..

Maybe I should've expressed myself more clearly. Sorry, not a native english speaker.
 
Latency: I have problems with certain plugins while playing live on my keyboard. Other plugins / plugin combinations run fine. This seems to be somewhat independent of CPU load, probably because I'm not a good keyboard player and usually record with most tracks on mute and click on.
 
Dropouts: I'm getting issues when one (1) single plugin goes above 50% CPU load, spiking is what they say. Those issues tend to produce quite dramatic results, from ASIO driver obviously crashing (constant noise on master channel at max volume) up to complete system lockup in extreme cases. There's not many instruments that manage to do that, but Falcon is definitely one of them, e.g. MultiGranular Srub / Strech IRCAM with oversampling.
 
Note: IRCAM is something like e.g. Radius, a CPU-intensive algorithm for pitch-shifting and time-stretching.

Two things:
First are you using plug-ins with look ahead capability or other processing that is not meant for tracking purposes/low latency situations?
 
Second, testing done by an audio computer builder expert (Jim R.) has shown that a lot of the first gen Ryzen motherboards are not designed to handle low latency audio.

Sorry I disagree with "Uncle Bob"s opinion. If you (or he) think it's true, some data would be nice. What was tested? Which CPUs, which mainboards, which chipsets, what DRAM, which soundcard(s), which software, which plugins... you get the idea. How was it measured? Against what was it compared?
 
So if anyone has a thing or two to say on the actual topic that would be great. I'm starting to wonder why I still come to this board. Slowly but surely getting hilarious.

here's Jim's testing: http://forum.cakewalk.com/i76850k-vs-i77700k-vs-Ryzen-1800x-m3578609.aspx
 
on the Delta 44 concern - i have both a Delta 66 and Delta 1010LT card and the older driver has some latency which bugs me during tracking but during mix time i set the buffers way up and don't worry about it.

Hi,
For what I know:Concerning latency with plug-ins, you have got a knob in Sonar's task bar labeled :" PDC" you should disable it when you instentiate plug-ins with look ahead behavior,it has something to see with delay compensation and you should hear your midi controler work in the right timing with this status off.
Then ,your soundcard seems to be pci based and you should have better results with a pcie based card.
Rme hdspe aio is good bargain here in Europa on the second hand market,Marian is also a good brand and It seems that Lynx cards are well placed in terms of prices in United-States.
Hope it helps.

To answer your interface question - there are a ton of threads talking about this in this subforum.  However, I would recommend a focusrite 2i2 if you want an interface with good Win10 drivers and low latency.  I am recommending that based on what I have read here and elsewhere (I don't have that interface.)
 
Again, what plug ins are you using that are causing  the issue and are they intended for mixing (i.e. they create high latency)?
 
And regarding "Uncle Bob" - he is one of the most helpful people on this forum regarding computers and fixing latency issues.  That comment is a little offensive.  If he happens to pop in here to help you, he might just see your comment and pop back out.
 
 

Actually Focurite Scarletts are not good performers compared to Motu or RME. 
From every long winded thread I've ever read on this forum it would seem you buy an RME if you want all interface issues to go away.