Hello fellow Sonarites! I'm messing around again with SONAR X1d/Win7 64 bits' core balancing and I am still puzzled / disappointed that my I7 (first gen) cpu is still hitting its first core over 50% while the other 6 cores are only being used lightly. I've tried different recommended tweaks in the AUDIO.INI file, without success. Mainly:
A) ThreadSchedulingModel (tried 0-1-2) B) MixThreadCount (tried 0 and other values from 2 to 7) C) Messed around with the settings regarding only (it seems) Win VISTA Nothing seemed to improve my situation... first core gets taxed as usual... So, I am now wondering if messing around with the ExtraPluginBufs parameter in the INI file could help. OR, is there a way to tell WINDOWS to use only cores 7 and 8, and configure sonar to use cores 1-6 ?? (maybe using the MixThreadCount parameter is achieving that goal in some way, even if it does not affect core 1's load directly...) Last question: is the WINDOWS 8 / Sonar X2 combo any better at balancing than X1 for you guys? I am still doubting about that... Thanks !!

Two things to consider:

Have you disabled Core Parking?

Is Speedstep (CPU EIST) disable in your system BIOS?

Killing both of these will go a long way to improving CPU performance. It won't totally even out the cores, but it will help.

Sorry... forgot about those two. SPEEDSTEP is off and I did the core parking stuff a year or so ago... but I changed my internal drive to a SSD during the year and I might have forgot to check that out at that time. I'll read again posts about this and check my system's status. Thanks.

here's how to set processor affinity for sonar.

http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=2794318