Thanks Jonesey. I will try. I will disable the on board sound and lan. What kind of average figure would you be satisfied with? I've not been recording so I don't know if that occasional peak of 444 would cause issues. I do know that the reading over 1000 would.
 
Maybe I should mention that I am using the onboard graphics (intel hd4000). However, the member Fireberd has very similiar specs to me and is still using the onboard graphics.
 
There is no wifi, bluetooth, pci cards. Just a motherboard and 2 hard drives. Will run latency monitor again see what  I find. Other option is to format and reinstall but dont see that helping at all because it is only the operating system on there.

Using onboard graphics, LAN and internet active, firewire interface to A&H ZED_R16 active my DPC max is 106.

System is:
Antec P183 case w/Nexus 630w PS
Gigabyte GA-Z77X and Intel i7-3770K 3.5 GHz quad
Cooler Master TPC-812
16GB Corsair DDR3-1600MHz
1 Seagate 1TB SATA 6Gb/s
1 Seagate 500G SATA 6Gb/s
Windows 7 Pro 64
Sonar X2 Producer

Gigabyte, if you installed everything on the drivers disc also installs "Easy Tune".  If you installed that uninstall it as it can cause major spikes in DPC Latency.
 
Drivers and RealTek sound are not a problem.

Thanks for the replies guys. I have disabled onboard sound and both lan ports. I then left DPC running for 2 hours. My average was around the 50-90 mark with an occasional peak at 121. I then got one peak at 144. So that seems improved. I do not know if its important but my machine was idle and my soundcard wasn't installed.
 
Do you think there would be an improvement moving from Windows 7 Ultimate? Maybe there is some service or process relevant to this particular iteration causing problems?
 
Anyway, all seems a bit better. Will likely install sonar tonight and see how it goes.
 
Fireberd, during my searching before I bought the components, I came across your thread that mentioned easytune so I was sure not to install it. Unless it was sneaky and hopped on the back of the drivers install then it cant be there. No mention of it in my programs folder.
 
Was thinking of connecting a spare HDD, disconnecting my system drive with windows 7and installing xp pro 64 bit for comparison.  Would this be a problem?
 
Thanks again.

I wouldn't bother

Win 7 is vastly superior to any flavour of XP for audio purposes

Hi all. Been a wee while but thought I'd post an update. Sonar has been installed and is running fine. No clicks or dropouts. Really been putting it through its paces. Been cloning tracks with multiband compressors and other cpu heavy effects and trying to find where things would turn to mush. Took some doing. So very happy thus far.
 
After a little more tweaking I'm getting a around 18 micro seconds on dpc with an avaerage peak of around 40 now and again. Seems solid. Done a lot of the usual tweaks alongside disabling core parking and turbo boost. I know a lot of people dont do these particular tweaks but they did make a difference.
 
Now this pc is plenty powerful but my interface seems to be the bottleneck with regard to audio latency. My readings are as follows:
 
Buffer size 96 samples, 2.2msec
Input 6.6
Output 6.2
Roundtrip 12.8
 
Now I know a lot of you guys would not be happy with 12.8 but I really cant notice it at all.
 
I am assuming that the quality of my a/d and d/a converters in my interface are making up the bulk of that latency?
 
Technically I can go a notch lower but i lose the stability and hardly gain anything latency wise. I should point out that there is no way to get to 10ms or under with this interface. No combination of settings would do it. Seems to be a limitation with this interface. With these settings I can run 'a lot' tracks, vsti's and effects with no problems.
 
 
Anyway, just thought I'd share the update, it may be of use to someone.
 
Cheers.
 
Richard
 
 

I am assuming that the quality of my a/d and d/a converters in my interface are making up the bulk of that latency?  

The A/D and D/A are actually the smallest part of the round-trip latency.
Together, they're probably less than 2ms.
The bulk of your (slightly high) round-trip latency is the audio interface's hidden safety buffer.
Most audio interfaces don't allow you to tweak the size of this buffer.

If your audio interface uses a large hidden safety buffer, you can mitigate that somewhat by doubling the sample-rate... or using a smaller ASIO buffer size (if available).  Of course, this comes at the expense of greater CPU use...

Thanks Jim. I remember reading about the hidden buffer a while back. The thing is if I move the slider in my interface asio panel down even a notch further I get  clicks and pops. What I would really like to know, are the pops a limitation of my pc or my interface? The pc is pretty high spec so I am assuming that this is the best I can get out of this interface.
 
For anyone that may be interested here are some pics of my settings:
 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 
Using the following settings results in some clicks:
 


 
 
I guess I always assumed that a well specced pc would be able to let the audio interface run at its max performance. If my interface has the options in its' asio panel to run a bit faster, why can't it? Surely it's not my pc? What is the bottleneck? Also, if you look at my stable settings and then the settings that gave me clicks, all I did was drop the slider 2 notches. It didnt change the buffer size but it shaved 2 ms from the output latency. How so? Did it alter the safety buffer?
 
Also thanks for thre tip regarding increasing the sample rate, I had never heard that one before.
 
Richard

Richard I would highly recommend booking a consultation with Jim and get the system tweaked Jim's work is second to none

Thanks Jim. I remember reading about the hidden buffer a while back. The thing is if I move the slider in my interface asio panel down even a notch further I get clicks and pops. What I would really like to know, are the pops a limitation of my pc or my interface? The pc is pretty high spec so I am assuming that this is the best I can get out of this interface.

 
Hi Richard,
 
Low/consistent DPC latency is absolutely paramount if you wish to work at the smallest ASIO buffer sizes.
With your current setup, you *can* achieve better performance.