About 6 months ago I built a Recording Computer and I run Sonar 8.5 music editing software. I have the P6X58-PRO mobo with 24 gigs GSkill Series DDR3 triple channel memory, an i7 950 processor, 2 ea 120 Gig Kingston HyperX (blue) SSD's w/ updated firmware for OS in a RAID 0 configuration using Win 7 64 bit Pro, an 80 Gig Velociraptor 10,000 rpm HD for working wav files/songs and a WD 250 gig 5400rpm HD for storage. I have all the up to date drivers loaded from ASUS according to the download search. This thing should scream but I get a lot of dropouts with only 20 tracks and 45 plug-ins, it should run 100 + tracks easily. It uses I use a Focusrite Liquid Saffire 56 as the audio interface via firewire Any ideas?

right from the start the first thing i see is your OS raided particularly raid 0..
a standard ssd offers no benefit to audio performance as an OS drive to begin with it just makes windows snappier
raiding 2 of them was absolutely pointless.. and asking for trouble. i wont even do raid 1 on an OS drive..

the 80G raptor is pretty old thats gen 1

saffire is not a low laterncy device set your buffers to 256 and see if you still get drop outs..

FYI there is no such thing as triple channel ram... the board support triple channel memory access..

I would also suggest checking out your DPC latency with a utility such as latency mon or DPC latency checker from these links:

http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon
http://www.thesycon.de/eng/latency_check.shtml

Play one of your sessions that you experience dropouts with and then look at the DPC latency checker graph.  If you see yellow and red spikes, DPC is the issue.

Sorry I have tried to edit this into paragraphs but it keeps putting it in a big block. When I installed the drives and tried to load the OS it automatically went to RAID 0. I had a lot of trouble getting the OS to load. I had intended to run a 120 gig SSD for OS and 1 for working files. When went into RAID 0 I pulled the Velociraptor from another computer for the working drive. It's usually best that an HD not get more than 1/2 full so it will run quickly, does the same hold true for an SSD? I can load the OS and all my plug-ins on the drive but it is close to 100 Gigs Sorry I mis-spoke, when I bought it on new egg it was advertised as triple channel memory, my point was the 24 gigs of RAM are a matched set so there shouldnt be a compatibility problem with the 6 sticks. What do you suggest I do to get the most performance out of this computer? It is only used for recording and only go's online to update Win 7 and Antivirus (MS Security Essentials) I normally record with the computer offline and keep the anti-virus off. I turn it on when someone gives me a file, I scan it and turn the Anti Virus off. Thanks for your help, I have struggeld with this for a few months. Steve PS drop outs at 256 and 512, no difference.

I have downloaded them and will give it a try. If it is DPC how dio I get rid of it?? BTW Do you work for Focusrite? Dont duhh me I have a couple other Focusrite based questions:-) Thanks for the help Steve

Hi Tankgod,

Both of those links that I posted have good information on both what DPC is and how to resolve DPC issues.  The short answer is you disable devices/services and test to see the difference until the DPC issues have been resolved.  Thesycon advises you to do this one by one in a trial and error type method.  The latency mon tool is usually able to specifically tell you which device/service is the cause of the problem.  I would recommend trying both tools as they both have their own advantages.

Yes I do work for focusrite.  If you have Focusrite specific questions, it is probably best if you contact us via the contact support form on our website:

http://us.focusrite.com/contact-support

Best Regards,

I tried the latency checkers, the sycon one says everything is fine and the resplendant one says im getting problems from my Nvidia kernals. I upgraded the driver and it was better, the hardfaults are off the chart. One thing that helped was I installed Jbridge. No more dropouts, everything runs great but my disc CPU usage went from 3% to 45-50% the disc usage is the same at 4%. Still bad pagefaults but at least I can mix.

Any other suggestions or ideas about the cause of the pagefaults or why the dramatic increase in CPU usage and possible steps to reduce it?

is there any Aud tweeks to help things out? I've increased the plug in buffers to 2, the latency is usually at 100 and when I try to set it to 20(ish) it usually reverts back to 100. It is my understanding high latencys can cause problems too.

Thank you for the help, I sincerely appreciate it even though it may take a day or two to implement suggestions.

This may be way out there but I just fixed a serious dropout problem but putting all the projects in the same drive as Sonar. 
Yes I know it's recommended for speed to put them on another drive but it turned out the second drive was not talking nicely to the c drive.

iquid Saffire 56 as the audio interface via firewire Any ideas?

what are you using for the Firewire controller?
My guess is it's not Texas Instruments...
That's where I'd put my money

I got the re-occuring spikes showing up in DPC Latency checker stopped. It was an Lmhost look up service  that I disabled. The spikes stopped immediatly and have not come back in 3 days so far, it hasnt had any affected my internet speed either. If anyone is interested I can post the process for turning off the LMHOSTS look up function in the LAN/Network settings.

I dont understand why turning this off stopped the spikes but it definitely worked.

Jbridge has stopped the dropouts completely and setting up a mild Over Clock (3.06 to 3.8) has reduced the CPU usage from 50 to 40% on a 22 track 93 plug in project.

Once I finish this mix project I'm going to fix the RAIDed SSD situation, I only wanted one SSD for OS in the first place. It will require a complete reinstall of everything and several days work but I need to get this straightened out.

Steve