Hi Bob disable redraw - unfortunately does not change the behaviour of X2. Flickr,com ;) CPU utilisation <25%, graphics card < 5%. I notice 100% utilisation of my disk when samples are preloaded by Kontakt 5 (on a dedicated disk) - no performance impact at all during this time. Its really odd. I eventually evened out the core parking via a registry change post W7 resinstall but it didn't improve things. Basically the system (from an brand new W7 install - on a 8 core Xeon) idles and then spike massively om 2 cores causing drop outs. The grpahic glitches are 100 constant. New projects. Old projects. It is really bizarre. I sincerely hope Cakewalk sort this out. I am absolutely convinced this is a software problem. I am running on a cakewalk certified PC!

Thanks for hanging in there.  I am a bit brain dead at the moment, having just spent the last 25 minutes typing as fast as I can for a different thread, so please bear with me.

Oh, and thanks for posting back on your redraw disabling, disappointing as that ended up being.

I believe that Core 1 is always going to be the hardest hit, but the spike causing dropouts is way uncool.

Have you tried running DPC Latency Check without Sonar running?  I am quite curious as to what this program reports after running for maybe 3-5 minutes on the min/avg/max latency detected on your system.

Also, I found it helpful to go through Device Manager and look at disabling things not needed for audio streaming.

Perhaps if you have not done so, can you try removing any graphics cards and just running basic VGA?  This would rule out any graphics interference.

Also, and extra software running as background services (antivirus, etc) might be interfering with things - something else to look at.

I hope I have not just repeated a bunch of stuff that was suggested earlier (maybe even earlier by me, yikes).  I just got back from dealing with a couple of friends losing their dog to a car, and it was pretty exhausting.

I WILL continue to look at things to assist you, and hope to here back from you on any of the above you have not yet tried.

Bob Bone

Weird, I have a thread out there about my crashing problems, but I am using XP with an older Nvidia graphics card and have no issues with your mentioned ripple effect. However I have read articles all over about graphics card drivers causing conflicts and issues. I am to the point of removing my graphics card to see if that helps my problem. I believe Cakewalk has some other issues causing X2 to be unstable, and I assume they will get their patchwork together, unfortunately I am running it on XP and will be left out of the picture, ironic huh? I wish you the best. I too have been a faithful Sonar fan over a decade, and X2 is starting to effect my song creativity. Try going to the plug in manager and disable all the 50 cent plug ins, or third parties. Also many graphics cards reserve a gig or so memory to run, you might can also adjust that. Make sure they don't share IRQ with the sound device. Just strang you guys are having ripple effects and I am not, but I am crashing constantly. Good Luck with it. Pro Tools would be my choice. FREE

Edited to remove my cranky initial response to Theycallmefree's intermingling of threads.

Bob Bone