Z370 Taichi, Awful Audio Issue when Overclocking..

I'm not sure I know the answer as there are quite a few variables involved, and I'm sure some of the experts here may have a totally different perspective.

Audio distortion can happen for a broad range of reasons.

I mix and master and record music, and I've found there are all sorts of Microsoft services and drivers that can clog up even the most ostensibly powerful hardware since real time audio is very vulnerable to anything locking up any part of the I/O chain.

For example, if you go into task manager and then look at the performance monitoring, you'll see a huge amount of Microsoft (and often cyber security) services completely clogging up the local network with all sorts of monitoring/reporting services, and these can actually lock out a key CPU core for long enough to cause all sorts of irritating clicks, pops, freezes, and possibly in your case "thunks".

It's all about you can only go as fast as the slowest ship/ restricted by the most clogged bottleneck.

The sound I heard I suspect if you're using the onboard audio vs an Audio Interface, could be in part caused by this kind of Microsoft BS.  It's like the boffins at Microsoft colluded to screw up anyone wanting real time sound and deliberately developed crappy code to clog up the latest Intel CPUs.  It just takes one incompatibility, or minor crash of even the most irrelevant and redundant service, and your TCP IP gets clogged with myriads of stupid meaningless Microsoft monitoring and reporting services all talking to each other and reporting each time one of them has a performance issue that they then lock up your cores while the real time audio processes are needlessly halted for processes that are completely irrelevant and actually counterproductive to your primary use.

I've been fighting this for a LONG time, and frankly Microsoft has a FU attitude about this.  I think from the reactions I've had that they actually thrive on causing no end of problems for people who want real time audio or video. If it's anything not Microsoft, they devise ways to sabotage it.  Honestly I'd love to sue them in a class action if we could prove there was collusion.  

OK, anti-Microsoft rave over...

Hope this perspective provides some perspectives to consider.  Try disabling anything in start up that may contribute to this issue.  Also, actively go into task manager and end unwanted stupid services that are chewing up bandwith.  You can test latency with latencymon too.  In performance in task manager, this will have the monitoring you can select, and you can watch CPU, network, and disk activity.  If you see a lot of peaks in network/disk activity, you can actually see which services are involved, which gives a clue.

I bet your CPU cores don't even break a sweat (under 25% utilization), yet your real time audio will pop/crack/freeze for no apparent reason because all this crap halts processing on a key core for some irrelevant service, and that will actively kill your real time playback/recording if it jams up the real time processing for long enough.  This happens even with the fastest hardware and configs etc.

Honestly, I'm at the end of my tether trying to fight this since Windows 8-10 have been released.

As I said, I think this is deliberate Microsoft sabotage, and frankly there is not much we can do about it, other than take risks removing these sabotage services and messing with the registry to try to kill these.  And even then, they often tie them to a necessary part of the OS, so if you kill them outright, it hurts key processes and crashes or impairs the OS and other applications.

Add to that all the other aspects that play into this, and it's a bloody nightmare.  Microsoft can go jump up a rope and hang themselves, they are corporate vandals in my view.  (In case you missed my angst, LOL).