Topic: Asus UX303L audio clicks/pops - Solution
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.