[ionactive]

Really good read. I follows all this and was getting some improvements, now the improvements are amazing and I cannot quite recall how I have done this?

Have latest Pro Tools build 2018.12

Have the latest October Windows 10 build (the one Pro Tools does not officially support yet.

Have a windows system - i9-7980XE with 64Gig RAM (basically a modded music PC from Scan).

With all of the above, and before I looked at this thread and others, I was getting 20% CPU usage at idle, even before opening a project. Once open, the CPU would actually drop a little with the odd spike. All cores (18 with out HT) were in use so it seemed. If I record enabled a track then CPU would jump up on core 9. It would play / record at 64 buffer, but better at 128 / 256. All well and good, but I thought better could be achieved.

So I followed various things like:

1) Turn of HT
2) Turn off overclocking
3) Turn off boost etc.

Then I applied the fix on this thread - got good results with 0,1,2,3 and 14,15,16 and 17 cores deselected. Overall CPU came down, less CPU random usage, but still some idle CPU usage.

So - I then used LatancyMon and found a couple of things that did not lok right. I appeared to have high latency on ntoskrnl.exe. Did a search and applied the following correction "BCDEDIT /SET DISABLEDYNAMICTICK YES " (from command prompt).

Looking again I noticed a few other things that lead me to:

1) Disable onboard audio (BIOS)
2) Disable onboard graphics (device manage) - I have geforce 680 card
3) Disable all wifi (BIOS)
4) Disable blue tooth

Rebooted.

THEN... when opening up Pro Tools i noted NO idle at all - nothing. Opened a session.... 0 or 1 % idle...

Record armed - NO CHANGE - low CPU.

Played session, recorded some sessions, loaded a load of Slate plugins... All with very low CPU. All of this WITHOUT deselecting any cores.... all 18 working available but not being used.

So then, in stages, I did the following. Each time I rebooted, checked LatencyMON for 1 hour, ran a performance pass mark test, and tested pro tools

1) Overclocked in stages
2) Turned HT back on
3) Turned boost back on

(all the things you are told to turn off).

It just got better and better. Currently have a super fast, super stable, very low CPU useage even on a big session....

The question I am not quite sure about, and this is annoying, I am not quite sure what fixed it?

ARHHHH!

Mark