Complete Windows stalls when using Reaper (DAW software).

[Timur_Born]

The CPU stress stalls that some people (including me) experience with stress tests are even worse than I thought. Up to now I mostly only put time into learning about Ryzen's general operation, compatibility and overclocking, but now I checked DAWBench in Reaper (BIOS 9920).

Turns out that even a single logical core being fully (over)utilized by Reaper leads to extreme system stalls close to making it unusable. That's 15 logical cores being unused and you still can watch graphic elements being built up from top to bottom and input (keyboard/mouse) being heavily broken. Even processes set to run at Realtime (31) priority get interrupted, all the while neither DPC or interrupt latencies can be measured to increase.

I uninstalled HWinfo and did not run any other software that reads out temps and such. On top of that I did a Clear CMOS and replaced the NVidia GPU driver with the Microsoft standard one. I tried various CPU core affinities and power schemes, different memory frequency and timing settings, all to no avail. My 16 thread CPU is literally turned into a 1 thread CPU for this kind of workload.

This also happens in Safe Mode and without using an actual audio driver (null device). It's worse than what I have seen from running ITB and ITB can even run smoothly without stalls under the same circumstances. To make sure that this is not an issue of Reaper (DAW software) I ran my test on an 8 year old 4-threads laptop and there it worked as expected, aka the software stalled when the core was overutilized while the rest of Windows remained usable.

[panni]

I'd suggest entering this issue into the google doc survey they've posted as a sticky here, as it seems to be reproducable.

[Scary_chicken]

Timur Born wrote:
Video playback and graphic output always get interrupted, which in turn results in GPU load and Video Engine load dropping considerably, including the GPU frequency and temperature dropping. Since timers keep rolling the video/graphic output will jump forward to match the new time-frame (a 5 second stall means that the video jumps 5 seconds forward). For Youtube videos in Firefox this is a true jump, for videos in MediaPlayerClassic this is a fast forward that shortly increases the frame-rate (while maintaining the refresh-rate, because disabling VSync doesn't seem to work properly). Both Firefox Youtube and Furmark also see their average CPU load drop because of the stalls that interrupt their processing, even though they do maintain their time-lines in form of a straight jump.

Interestingly HWInfo's graph display works similarly to how Firefox Youtube playback and Furmark works. The graph will do a full jump to the new time-frame instantly after a stall instead of drawing the in-between measurements. If you mouse-over the graph you can see several seconds being absent corresponding to the stall time.

The short increase of frame rate is exactly what I constantly get in BF1 after huge FPS drops. It looks like going to slow motion to recover not by jumping to last frame but like" buffering" and loading all the frames in a fraction of a second (e.g. imagine a 20 frames sequence where the dots will indicate the time between one frame and the next: 1...2...3...4...5...6...7(FPS drop event)........8.............9....................10............................11121314151617...18...19...20...). Looks like "fast forwarding" the scene). It's been driving me crazy and so far this doesn't seem to happen to everyone. My FPS drop from 100 to 8 sometimes together with the audio output (not all the time) from a fraction of a second to up to 10 seconds or so. Stress testing the CPU with any benchmark including realbench, OCCT and others will immediately freeze my PC for various periods somewhere from 30 seconds to 3 mins to where mouse, keyboard, etc won't work to resume later like nothing happened. This happens even after loading optimized BIOS settings (F5) and everything at stock.

I have a Asus Crosshair VI, Ryzen 7 1700, GSkill 3200 CL14 RGB, BIOS version 1501, GTX 1080ti, Chipset driver 17.30.

[Jackwolfskins]

Welcome to the club of CH6 Stalls and Freezes .

[Scary_chicken]

Jackwolfskins wrote:
Welcome to the club of CH6 Stalls and Freezes .

Is this only happening to CH6 users? If so, I will try to get a different motherboard because is really frustrating. I don't know if the cause is the CPU, motherboard or even the Windows creators update that I have seen posted as a probable cause.

[Jackwolfskins]

Scary_chicken wrote:
Is this only happening to CH6 users? If so, I will try to get a different motherboard because is really frustrating. I don't know if the cause is the CPU, motherboard or even the Windows creators update that I have seen posted as a probable cause.

Well i dont swim in money and was saving for quite a while to buy this new machine so ill be stuck with this problems, ive always bought Asus for my systems iam realy disapointed with the lack of help from offical Asus personel, it will be realy dificult for me to recomend asus to anyone at this point.

[Timur_Born]

Already did so before posting here. There is a good possibility that the Reaper stalls are related to Windows 10 "Creators". I will likely find out later today.

[Jackwolfskins]

HI Timur Born , already seen you posts on AMD forums and Overclock.net , i also have the same problem those stalls are definitly software but not the creators update , ive already tryed 2 installs of windows , both of them i got the same conclusion , for me its either the AMD chipset drivers or audio drivers.

Ive i keep Windows isntall default , i can run all the stress tests with no issue no stalls i can stress it, open chrome youtube etc at same time not even a hint of stalls.

Ive tryed Stock and OC, all bios too, after i install both chipset drives and audio drivers the system stats presenting stalls on all my stress test software namely OCCT , Asus Realbench , IBT AVX .

Strangely Prime95 never stalls i find it strange tho why P95 is clear of any issue on any type of stress test.

Its a real bummer i hope someone figures out what is the cause of this.

Also i would like to point out to other that this are not minor stalls like stutering these are horrible up to 1 min pauses where every thing is frozen and then all of a suddent comes back to life no error or anything. I also find it funny that OCCT after you stop it gives you a chart , the actual chart show time reversion , maybe i have a time machine and dont know about it 😛