Yeah, I disabled it. No luck.

Wow! I've been having intermittent spikes and dropouts on my new box so I went through some of the recommendations I found on this thread and everything works really well now. The dropouts are now completely gone even with the lowest latency settings. I was even able to drop my midi buffer to 32ms with no cut outs.
I've got a quad core i7-4770K with 32 gb.
The following worked wonders:
1. Turned off powerstep, C3 states, and Turbo boost
2. Turned off the page file.
Bugs squished, thanks to all for the info!
Just wow!

> Turned off the page file.
I wouldn't recommend this even with a ton of memory, I would leave it to be managed by the operating system. There is however some benefit to move it on the fastest drive/partition. (it used to be one of those things that used to be really important to do but with all this memory floating around it's becoming less and less so).
 

Hey, Tom! I'm glad you're getting good performance.
 
It's never a bad idea to make yourself some notes in case you have an OS Reinstall somewhere in your future... that sort of thing. I'm my own worst enemy when it comes to this stuff. I run a tuner for the mother board and whammo back to square one.

southpaw3473
Hi all,
I've done everything mentioned in the above posts and I still have the same problem of the first core being nearly 50 higher than the other 7. I am obviously missing something and it's driving me a little nuts. Does anyone else have an inkling of why this is? Thanks again!

I was trying to find a nice explanation bitflipper gave in a thread a while ago. Even though you *can* run 8 threads through a 4-core processor does not make it "efficient." Some processes need to stay in one thread or they actually process slower (or cannot process at all). Core 0 is by default the "workhorse" of the machine, and is used as such, so should always be higher. Unless it is maxing out on you, it is not an issue.
 
On my machine, Core 0 is often the only core running, and has been that way for 2 1/2 years now. In almost all applications, Core 0 will be double the other threads in my CPU.

CakeAlexS
> Turned off the page file.
I wouldn't recommend this even with a ton of memory, I would leave it to be managed by the operating system. There is however some benefit to move it on the fastest drive/partition. (it used to be one of those things that used to be really important to do but with all this memory floating around it's becoming less and less so).
 

Spot on!!!!

I was going to say something like mettelus refers to. Some processes are only single thread. And a few of those are OS related. So add them up and you will see why one core is always higher.

Start Task Manager and just run your PC with other programs going, not Sonar and see what you get.

And I wouldn't turn my page file off either. Sometimes when you want to move huge files and page file is off you might get an error that would never lead you to think of your page file as being the cause of that error. You'll think your OS is bonked!

Grem
I was going to say something like mettelus refers to. Some processes are only single thread. And a few of those are OS related. So add them up and you will see why one core is always higher.

Start Task Manager and just run your PC with other programs going, not Sonar and see what you get.

And I wouldn't turn my page file off either. Sometimes when you want to move huge files and page file is off you might get an error that would never lead you to think of your page file as being the cause of that error. You'll think your OS is bonked!

Thanks guys for the reassurance that the core 0 spike is normal. I didn't turn off page file. I'll keep an eye on it.

And get yourself a real task manager.

Thankis Alex for the task manager tip! Wicked handy utility!