Modartt user forum - Asus UX303L audio clicks/pops - Solution

Re: Asus UX303L audio clicks/pops - Solution

null@example.com (Ciel Rose) — Fri, 17 Mar 2017 13:39:05 +0000

It would be usefull to have a thread just for this I agree. Seting up a PC is hard work nowadays, specially laptops with all the power saving features, bloathware, etc.
I see that you're from Lisbon, so am I! Glad to see someone here in the forum from Portugal.

Re: Asus UX303L audio clicks/pops - Solution

null@example.com (mfiadeiro) — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 10:50:59 +0000

Hi Ciel Rose,

Great tip!
It would be awesome if Moddart could create a sticky topic named "Performance issues" or "Troubleshoot" with the solutions that the forum users found to solve common/typical problems.
Thanks for sharing!

Asus UX303L audio clicks/pops - Solution

null@example.com (Ciel Rose) — Tue, 14 Mar 2017 19:00:48 +0000

I wanted to share my troubles with my current laptop, a ASUS UX303L with i7 5500U and 8gb Ram.

I've been using this laptop for 2 years now live with an RME Fireface UCX sound card. Since the first day I always had problems selecting audio buffers below 256 samples on the RME no matter what I did. I started by creating a High Performance custom mode, uninstalled bloatware and selected the essential at startup. With all of this the laptop became 2x faster but still I couldn't get rid of random clicks/pops.I opened pianoteq performance window and could see random CPU spikes at 100%! After a while I just settled at 256 samples with rare clicks and blamed the undervoltaged CPU (the Bios is a minimal one, no answer to stop CPU throtthling).
Well, this week I had some free time and decided to take another go at it. I found it finally!
I have an NVIDIA 940m graphics card and on the options I was using the CPU/graphics card for the Physx engine and had it in performance mode (had totally forgotten about this). I changed to only using the graphics card for the Physx engine and selected "best performance" (not "best quality") and all was solved.
Now I can push sample rate as low as 64 on the RME with pianoteq with no CPU spikes!

I thought this could help any user with this type of CPU.