First off thanks you folk who guided dumb 'ole me through the monitoring setup. I've since RTFM and appreciate the hand-holding!
 
I'm getting ready to do final vox tracking for a record. I've created new project files that just have a rough mix, the isolated guide vocals, and that's it. Nice and lean. But, some projects still give me dropouts when I'm running in record. I was curious what your driver settings are for comparison. I know no two DAWs are the same, but I wanted a starting point while I try and fine-tune it.
 
Mine, currently, are:
24/44.1
Buffer in OC: "6", buffer size 256 samples
Latency: In - 6.9, Out - 13.9, roundtrip - 20.7 (915 samples)
 

You should have joy at 256 samples, however, I believe your processor is circa 2006 which is old age in "CPU years." Also it sucked a lot of watts, so in 2007 it transitioned to a model that allows stepping with lower-power motherboards.
 
I am not familiar with stepping but several computer-savvy types on this board have mentioned something about how power stepping can be an issue. Hopefully one of them can identify whether this is a problem with your setup or not.
 
I agree it's kind of a drag that 2006 is considered ancient for a CPU, but that seems to be what life in the fast lane is about these days...in any event I would look for issues other than the Octa-Capture or Sonar as reasons for the latency. 

Yah, upgrading the DAW is on my list...I have Komplete sitting on my shelf just SCREAMING at me to get installed...but I want to wait until this record is over. Last time I upgraded in the middle of a project it was a nightmare. Granted, most of it was my own darned fault (I went from XPsp2 so W7/64...bad idea!) but everything is working right now and there's no way I'm rocking the boat when the finish line is within my grasp! :-)
 

...wicked:
 
Your post mentions that you still occasionally get "drop-outs" when recording.  Your system specs along with the Octa-Capture and the settings you have posted would seem to me to be more than adequate to provide a stable recording environment.  Could it be something else that's causing your drop-outs?
 
I say this because I too had issues with occasional recording (and playback) dropouts unless I set my ASIO to run at 44.1khz with a buffer size of (something like) 1024.  This was even after I had upgraded to a powerful 4th Gen I7 processor based system to use with my Octa-capture.  I tweaked and twerked (Yikes! Now THAT'S scary!) the Octa-Capture and Sonar settings for weeks until someone made a suggestion in one of the threads in this forum to set the "Minimum processor state" to 100% in the available "Power Options\Advanced Settings\Processor power management" on my system.  That seemed to clear things up!
 
Once I made that change, it seemed I was able to reliably run the Octa-Capture at much higher rates (96khz) and much lower buffer sizes (192 samples) to get my total round trip latency down to just above 8ms.  (Incidentally, with my setup, that sample rate turned out to be a big waste of system resources.  I now run at 48khz with an ASIO buffer size of 48 samples for a total round trip latency of 6ms.)
 
Have you tried setting the "Minimum processor state" to 100% on your system yet?  If not, maybe this will help with your occasional recording drop-outs.
 
Hope this helps,
Paul
 

Thanks man, I'll check that out!