I am setting up a modern (but not cutting edge) PC as a DAW. It's a Core 2 Duo pushed to 3.5GHz, 4GB RAM and an ATI 4670 PCIe graphics card (which is latest generation mid-end). Motherboard: ASUS, P43 chipset Sound card: ESI Juli@ PCI OS: Vista SP1 32bit At 128 samples latency, I get crackles when I scroll a project in Reaper, or when tooltips show up, or when I move windows around. At 256 samples, I get an occasional hickup every now and then. Not what you wanted to hear, me neither... The PC is not super optimized yet, there's a wireless USB Wifi thing going, and I haven't tried disabling the CPU speedstep (the auto clock thing to save power). But I do get the crackles on GUI operations specifically so... Will investigate more.

I pass your test Dave....no pops here. E6600 Intel 8800gt Nvidia What Nvidia driver are you running?

hmm.. so it seems some folks get it, some folks dont. I wonder what the connection is here.... To answer Brad,- I've tried the ones XP come with, and the ones from the Nvidia website, which I assume are some kind of bundle which deal with all the cards. Kind regards Dave Rich

Benchmark your system now :D - Download the 32-bit build of Passmark Performance Test here: - Set your desktop resolution to 1280x1024 32bit color @ 60Hz and run the 2D test. - Post your scores and your PC specs (CPU/videocard/OS) here. I've managed to get a 'junk' PC (a lowly AthlonXP with a Radeon 8500 LE card) just for this benchmark ;)

ok done it. this is at 1280x1024 60hz, and at 16bit colour ('cos that's what it's normally running on) the results are. 2d Graphics Mark - 509.6 solid vectors 3.82 transparent vectors - 0.68 complex vectors - 102 fonts and text - 117.8 windows interface - 713.4 image filters - 251.2 image rendering - 73.1 Make of that what you will :) Kind regards Dave Rich

just for kicks also did it at 32bit Mark - 421.1 solid vectors - 3.70 transparent vectors - 0.44 complex vectors - 106 fonts and text - 90.3 windows interface - 560.5 image filters - 191.5 image rendering - 56.9

FOUND THE CURE!!! wow wierd.. disable anticipative and synchronous multiprocessing and i'm good to go! no more crackles. Sorted:) I'll leave minds greater than mine to figure out why that happens. :D Kind regards Dave Rich

Dave (and the last poster) do you mind if I ask just out of curiosity what the cpu loads were in your projects that had intermittent glitches described above? There is (or perhaps more accurately was?) an issue with cpu spiking caused by some graphic operations. I don't know if that's been addressed or not. I was wondering if your glitches are on low load projects or higher cpu load projects which would seem to make more sense if that is the cause. Try using the older default theme for a while and see if they go away.