Audio Latency Issues - ASRock Z170 Extreme 7+ AIC

Hello All,

I'd appreciate input to help solve audio latency issues I'm finding. 

I mix music and have been finding weird issues effecting playback and recording.

This results in slow downs, pops, cracks, and complete gaps in playback.  Recording, the latency should be minimal, but can be like it's at over 2000...

Specs:

ASRock Z170 Extreme 7+
ASROCK AIC Thunderbolt 2 card
i7 7700K CPU
16 GB DD4 3200 RAM
Resident T4 Audio Interface (Via Thunderbolt 2 cable, has latest Resident driver)
Samsung Evo 960 256 SSD
Some standard HDDs and a couple of SATA SSDs
Windows 10 64 Home
FL Studio 12.5.1.5


I've been running a Resident T4 Thunderbolt 2 Audio Interface via an ASRock AIC card with thunderbolt 2 capability successfully.

While the sound that comes through is the best I've heard on a PC, I do find weird latency issues, but I'm suspecting these may stem from the CPU getting jammed with microsoft and security software services (Drivers etc) that report and saturate the TCP IP, and lock up the i7 7700K CPU with crap.

The combination of T4 and AIC card seems to work really well, and for a while I thought the CPU wasn't cutting it, but all the test I've run show the CPU is barely breaking a sweat.

The CPU does not appear to be overloaded as the individual cores don't even break 25% utilization, even when I have a lot of tracks (say 50-100) all with compressors, EQ, and other processing (Reverb and Delay send tracks that cover buses esp).

However this gets my DAW (FL Studio 12.5.1.5)  to the 100% CPU mark, while the latency issues I have identified with latencymon are mainly TCP IP and some other ridiculous and non essential Microsoft services (which I try to turn off and even went into the registry to kill some), and things like vsmon.exe for Zone Alarm security.

At the same time, if I have much loaded up, this also drives the recording latency up.  If I shut down everything that is unnecessarily in  task-manager, startup, etc, this helps, but still I have to streamline my recording projects with minimal processing to get the latency to an acceptable level.  This kind of defies the benefit of Thunderbolt 2, and makes me think there is a software or weird mix of factors effecting the audio latency.

I do know that because audio playback needs to be sequential in real time, that the requirements to make this happen are much more involved than say rendering audio or video.  Hence had aimed to set up a system that can handle the real time processing to deliver.  (FYI, I set the DAW to the highest priority in task manager, and kill anything that might take up processing resources that is not necessary).

This is driving me nuts as this should be screaming, yet seems to get clogged up.  I see the TCP IP traffic fly up, yet not much is going in or out to the web, it's mainly "local".  Yet I've tried to kill everything that runs up the traffic, but it still seems to be very active.  I've also ensured the drivers are up to date, and as much as I can are both compatible and are the best versions for the job (unless anyone knows of any issues with specific drivers I should be aware of).

I'm not sure how to proceed from here, I just know that in theory the performance should be much better and it seems to have become worse since updating to Windows 10 (64).

I'd appreciate knowledgeable suggestions, perspectives and approaches.


Edited by eComposer - 21 Dec 2017 at 6:21pm