Dear all,

I am writing you this in the hope it helps you too / to give you a good working idea to get more audio stability on a Windows Laptop. This suggestion is not only limited to exactly that laptop, everybody with built-in Intel HD Graphics and additional NVIDIA Graphic card should be able to use this solution.

I connected my RME UFX via USB3 port to a Lenovo T540p (i5-4300M with Intel HD Graphics 4600) and wondered that I got audio drops by simply scrolling up and down in a Firefox window (recording.de Forum overview page). I am using the latest drivers as of today.

Changing the power profile to "high performance" didn't help. Only raising the buffersize from 48 to 512 samples cured the problem, but having such a high buffersize didn't satisfy me and I assumed it has another root cause, as RME drivers should bring better "performance".

When scolling up and down more rapidly and observing the system I noticed, that the CPU load went up from nearly nothing up to 45%!

This reminded me, that the Laptop has 2 graphic cards built in, one INTEL (inside of the CPU) and one additional NVIDIA 730M. I found out, that you can configure in the NVIDIA control center, which application shall use either the built-in Intel or the NVIDA CPU.

As soon as Firefox has been displayed using the NVIDIA card all the problems were gone. When scrolling up and down the same webpage I did not get any noticably CPU spikes anymore (only up to 17%)  and I can use 48 samples as ASIO buffersize without any problem!!! Additionally it also works with a lower power profile now.

To be able to really use 48 samples it depends on your installation and what you are doing. Choosing "high performance" as power profile and enabling Lenovo Turbo Boost is recommended for such low sample settings.

This should work in theory for any USB/Firewire Recording device with decent drivers and on any system with builtin Intel HD 4xxx and additional Grafic acceleration card, maybe even with Apples which have the same design.

Now I thought it might be a good idea to add also other applications which produce grafic output like Digicheck and Totalmix.

Does somebody perhaps know the path of the program of the totalmix mixer application ?