Cpu Spikes

I’ve been having problem with my cpu spiking when using
renoise and reaper, at least when asio is on. I have a
quad core phenom II 3.2 ghz machine and when I run these
programs they can take up to 25% of my cpu without any
plugins. When I turn asio off the cpu spikes stop.

On the taskmanager performance meter it spikes
up and down like a sawtooth wave. It ranges from 0%-25% or so
and spikes up and down about every couple of seconds. I’m using
and audio kontrol interface by Native Instruments. Running latency at
3ms or 10ms seems to make no difference.

Any suggestions?