I don't think that you can get around the first core spiking to be honest. It's never going to be even. I'm guessing that OS activity is one of the main reasons why the first core gets so much more use. 

However, I do wish Sonar would give you the option of choosing how many cores to utilize. Pro Tools gives you this option and indeed many people get better CPU performance out of it by reducing the number of cores the DAW uses, I'm thinking because this allows the OS to use the remaining cores. 

Has anyone looked into some of the other options in the config file, like MixThreadCount? 

Yeah I've messed around with all that stuff, sharke. The best bet in my opinion is to stay away from MixThreadCount and if someone decides to mess with thread scheduling....the best bet is to leave it at 1, or revert to 0 for the old way Sonar processed. I get the best results with 1. I get better results with 0 than I do with 2 and I'm a quad....so I guess it will be different per system.

-Danny

Easy way to tweak performance options: use Duckbar. http://www.sonarmods.com/...ptions-1-0-build14.JPG

You have that for X2a yet Panu?

X2a is supported. There's a minor graphics issue in some of the mods with interleave button (update coming asap) but otherwise Duckbar works great with X2a.

If you run LatencyMon and look at the CPU tab you will see that all the interrupts are handled by Core 1.

I suppose that is by (Intel/Microsoft) design and not changeable, so I don't think any Thread Model setting will make a difference to Core 1.

If I understand the Thread Model, Model 2 is producer/consumer model which creates a new worker thread which runs in a core to spread the load to other cores. If that is accurate, the more cores you have the more you may benefit from model 2.

I use model 2.

Turn off Intel speedstep or equivalent (AMD powernow, core parking in Windows)... etc... Apart from those of you who have a chip that supports it, and a motherboard that doesn't, in which case engage phantom pregnancy mode.

How? 

Google.

sharke


I don't think that you can get around the first core spiking to be honest. It's never going to be even. I'm guessing that OS activity is one of the main reasons why the first core gets so much more use. 

However, I do wish Sonar would give you the option of choosing how many cores to utilize. Pro Tools gives you this option and indeed many people get better CPU performance out of it by reducing the number of cores the DAW uses, I'm thinking because this allows the OS to use the remaining cores. 

Has anyone looked into some of the other options in the config file, like MixThreadCount? 

Go to task manager, click the on the processes tab, right click on the Sonar executable and choose "Set Affinity...".
 
To be honest, if reducing the number of cores in ProTools helps performance, it's probably because their multi-threading is not up to scratch.