I feel that asking this question will just show how ignorant I am but this is how I learn.
 
What is the single greatest factor in improving latency in Cakewalk?
 
Is it faster ram? Is it more CPUs (like an I9)? Is it moving from a 2.0 USB audio interface to a 3.0 interface? 
 
Or, all of the above, like a faster graphics card eventually bottlenecks without also upgrading the CPUs and ram.
 
Is it the chip set on the motherboard?
 
When I sing my vocals I usually do it "in the dark" meaning I do not listen to my recorded vocal because the latency just throws me off even if the latency is minuscule. I know my 2.0 Roland quad capture says it has "zero latency" but actually the farthest I can go down is about 5ms and any lower and the music starts to cut out.
 
Would I do better getting a 3.0 audio interface or getting an I9 with ten CPUs and 20 threads?
 
Currently I have a 64 bit quad core (non hyper threaded) CPU.
 
Thanks in advance for any info on this subject.
 
Also, has anyone installed Cakewalk on an I9 yet? How do the VST plugins and effects perform in load balancing and CPU headroom? Just curious. 
 
Best to you all!

Often the constraint is neither IO nor processor nor memory.
 
The longest pole in the processing chain will slow down all the others. This means that if one track takes longer to process than the others, your IO and Processing power will not be used in their entirety. So it is usual to not use them in their entirety.
 
I made this video exploring it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-F6xevvhFs&t=149s
 
This video shows how to use Latency Monitor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOVuzOja-yE
 
If you problem is with dropouts, either faster disk access (SSD) or faster processors is likely to help.

Hello Gswitz!
 
Was your latency test done before or after the load balancing Sonar update and was load balancing checked?

After and load balancing was not checked.
 
You can play with it yourself. It's a fairly simple test. If you have the same heavy plugin on all tracks you can use 90% of your processing power.
 
If you stack up a bunch of look ahead effects on one track and have 10 tracks with LP EQs, you will see the processing come down from 90 to around 30 percent.
 
If you enable load balancing, you can get back up to around 50%, but in my experience for most of my mixes, I don't tend to climb much over 50 percent.

BTW, I don't tend to turn on load balancing because I understand it can hurt some when you are trying to work with heavy synths (which load balancing doesn't help with).