Since I received my new NOS1, I have been switching between W7 and W8. The reason for it is that I "heard" lots of people raving about how W8 sounds and that it was way better than W7. That was the only reason why I got a licence for W8 (and it was cheap to upgrade also).
But yes, the differences I heard between them pushed me back to W7, but I was late compared to many colleagues here, because of the addition of the NOS1, that is, by the way, a wonderful one. XXHighEnd + the NOS1 have pushed things to a direction I would never imagine to turn that deep.
So, since I was discovering this addition, I did not care too much about checking other things.
So I was quite surprised to see that I can't "quiet" the CPU cores, at least for the one(s) used to play the music.
Among the settings, I first disabled all I could (PA, XTweaks, normalization), to reduce the variables in the equation. I even reinstalled a backup from W7 to eliminate the potential "alterations" I could have done that would induce a negative result (sometimes, too much of something can have an adverse effect).
I use whatever tools that I know (there are surely others) to help me in my quest for a quieter PC: DPC Latenty Checker from Thesycon, LatencyMon from Respledence Software and of course the Task Manager -> Performance tab . I even went in the BIOS to reduce the ram speed (from 2133mhz "XMP" state that overclocks the CPU) back to its standard 1333mhz ram speed.
Before having this pc, I had 2 others: am old laptop with a 1.6ghz dual core CPU + 4GB ram with W7 pro (64 bit), also a Lenovo with a G620 dual core (2.6ghz) - each of them with the same exact OS properties. I was able to get at least one quiet CPU core for the music.
Now I have an Intel 3930k CPU 6 + 6 cores (hyperthreaded) but I can't seem to get at least one to stay "quiet" and it eludes me...
I deactivated all the USB 3 ports from it just to check, even the Sotm USB 3 PCIex with which I had so many problems before (was generating blue screens with my previous Audiophilleo - Bryston configuration), but not anymore with the NOS1. I plugged the NOS1 through the motherboard USB 2 ports (Intel), but it does not change a thing.
There is a pulse each 60 seconds on all cores with the DPC Latency Check and the driver that seems to induce the latency is the Phasure NOS1 driver itself... I got the 1.03 version for W8 that also works for W7. I don't know if this was happening with the previous driver version or not, but I don't have it.
I have tries the most "relaxed" adjustments from XXHighEnd, but I haven't been able to overcome this situation. Maybe it is normal, maybe it is something with my motherboard (ASUS Sabertooth X79 with lga 2011 socket), or something obvious I don't see, but it seems annoying for me to have such a powerful pc without a way to get at least one or two quiet cores.
Not that I don't like what I hear, but...
Is there something I haven't thought of ? The answer seems obvious, but at this point, I have changed the Q1 between 3 and 30, SFS between 2 and 430, clock resolution between 5 and 15ms...
Thanks
Alain