I bought a new Asus ROG Strix G17 G713PU-RS94 laptop in December 4th 2024, and I have been experiencing clicks in audio playback using USB interfaces. I am a pro-user and I have never experienced this before even with my old 2020 desktop I assembled myself which specs were much inferior to the G713PU.
As an audio engineer and musician, my computer is used mostly for audio production, specifically using sampled sound libraries, VST instruments and plugins.
I tried several scenarios to try to solve the issue but unfortunately with no success as I will describe below. I didn’t do any tweaking or optimization on windows.
These are my Computer Specs:
◦ AMD Ryzen 9 7940HX (16 cores/32 threads)
◦ RTX4050 6GB
◦ 64 Gb DDR5 4800mHz CP5-38400 Crucial RAM (I did replace the 16 GB from factory by 2x32 Crucial)
*** FYI I do have a Sabrent USB 3.2 10 Gbps Type C enclosure with an extra NVMe SSD attached as well as Wavlink USB C docking station for extra monitors and usb.
My OS harddrive is the original that came in the laptop a NVMe MTFDKBA1T0QFM-1BD1AABGB MICRON which I did a performance benchmark as follows:
I installed an extra fast Samsung 990 Pro NVME hardrive where my sampled sound library are installed and read from:
◦ I tested Computer on Airplane mode / Wifi OFF (to minimize any conflict)
◦ I closed all other softwares besides Bitdefender Antivirus
*** All Tests performed using a piano sample library on Kontakt 7 software and also playing audio from the web and Izotope RX audio editor
*** Tests 1 to 5 used ASIO audio driver which is the best for any serious audio application on Windows.
Test 1:
Sample rate:48kHz Buffer Sizes: 1024 CPU usage: less than 10% (sometimes 3 and 4%) RAM usage: 39.3 GB of 63.2 GB (Task Manager)
Results: I get random clicks
Test 2:
Sample rate:48kHz Buffer Sizes: 64 CPU usage: less than 10% RAM usage: 39.3 GB of 63.2 GB (Task Manager)
Results: I get more random clicks than test 1
Test 3: I tried a different soundcard Presonus AudioBox GO
Test 4: I tried different USB cables to connect to the Interfaces (both USB 2.0 and USB-C ports on the laptop)
Test 5: I disconnected the 2 HDMI monitors connected and all USB devices (other than the audio interface itself) leaving the laptop “naked”.
Results: No matter what I do I always get random clicks not only on Kontakt which can be a more demanding task (which in this case it is not even that demanding on CPU as shown) but also with the most simple tasks like playing an audio from the internet or one wav file from my computer when I use audio interfaces.
Final Test:
So my final test was to remove my USB audio interface and use the laptop own’s Realtek audio driver and surprisingly I didn’t have any click playing audio from the web.
I tested Izotope RX and Kontakt 7 with the basic WASAPI driver (which is far from being a good audio driver professionally) and I didn’t have any issue in RX. In Kontakt I didn’t have any click with a buffer size of 512. I had very rare clicks when I changed the buffer size to its minimum of 160 (which for such a bad driver was to be expected)
Final Considerations:
I bought this laptop for professional used with audio production, the specs are amazing, but unfortunately I am not able to work with a USB interface without having random clicks (no matter the buffer size, no matter the audio task)
What would you suggest?
What diagnostic test could I do for you to try to solve the issue? Any tweaks on windows?
It seems the laptop issues is on the USB ports that somehow influence the sound streaming Maybe a chipset problem?
Performance is very important for me, and it has been very frustrating to have such problem with such small load on cpu, ram and hardrive. My job as an audio editor requires critical listening of voice to be able to clean every and single noise and click to make it as “pure and clean” as possible and to try to do this with random clicks is quite hard.
