Brand new hardware but 95% CPU load in a normal project

[Jeremy_NSL]

You should get much better performance than that on an athlon 3000+. I have the same cpu and Kjaerhus effects barely dent it. One instance of Classic Reverb takes 3.3% of my cpu, so in theory I could run ~30 reverbs before maxing out. Try running Classic Reverb in Chainer (demo version is fine) and report back the cpu usage it shows.

The other possibility is energyxt asio problems. I heard the standalone has poor performance with high cpu. But run as a vsti is much better. Try running energyxt inside Chainer and see if the cpu usage changes.

edit: forgot to mention I'm running 384 sample latency on my audiophile 2496