I had at times two UFX+, RayDAT and ADI-2 Pro connected to one PC based on 2011-3 Supermicro Server board.
Simply excellent.

Playback of 400 tracks with 2 VSTs per channel -> 800+ VSTs in use.
Works with UFX+ (USB3) as well as with RayDAT (PCIe)
at lowest ASIO buffer sizes: 32@44.1, 64@96 kHz.

No audio drops on playback, CPU load equal (no visible difference between USB3 (UFX+) and PCIe (RayDAT).

The test: https://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/ind … cks-de-en/

Some information about PC HW in use, slowly comes to its ages, but still in use: https://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/ind … mponenten/

Windows is a very nice platform for recording.
People say that Core Audio has a higher base latency compared with ASIO.

You will also see that some of the restrictions of Apple do not exist anymore.
The two most prominent:
- Globalrecord is only available for Windows
- DIGIcheck: you can monitor HW inputs and outputs without trickeries

Most important for operating Windows 10 these days is
1. that you have a reliable backup solution
2. good separation of OS/Applications and user data (at least two SSDs/disks)

To 1)
The current update cycle of Win10 is not only tough for customers, but also for Microsoft.
You get updates every 6 months that do not seem to be tested very well by Microsoft.
You can't parametrize Win10 Update to only deploy security/stability fixes like it was possible under Win7.
This alone makes a big difference in stability.
I heard that its planned to change this, but even then I have doubts that the quality will be great.
This means
- you should delay your updates and only update when it appears to be safe
- don't be the 1st
- you need to be prepared to be able to restore to the previous state

To 2)
Use a good disk Layout for the Windows PCs.
With Win10 1809 last year many customers lost their data.
Because the Win10 upgrade was more like a major upgrade replacing Win10 entirely.
Users that kept their data in the usual place and not to a separate volume, best on dedicated disk, lost their data.
Best practise is to assume, that things like this might happen again.
So plan your disk layout wisely.
You need at least one SSD for OS and Applications and
another one only for user data.
I am using nowadays big SSDs, so that also Sound Libraries can be on the disk for OS/Applications.
Then you have all the OS/applications on one disk working.
This is also a good layout for backup and restore, as you do not loose time on backing up / restoring user data as well,
when you actually only want to restore the OS / Applications of yesterday.

The currently most reliable backup solution is currently Macrium Reflect.
https://www.macrium.com/products/home

I have 600 GB on my primary disk with Windows OS, Applications, VSTi's.
I can restore to the status of yesterday or last week in under 10-15 Minutes.
Macrium has a feature called "rapid delta restore" (not part of the free version !).
On a full restore it replaces only those disk blocks that need to be replaced.
Even if a Win10 update is big, actually only a few things get replaced on disk compared to the total amount of data.
This results in extremely fast restore cycles and also reduces the wear on SSDs.

Another things you might want to take care of is, that Win10 sends many data "home".
At the moment it looks that O&O Win10 Shutup takes care of most of these annoyances and thus silences the system a little bit, because if you work with audio with near real-time demands, its counter productive to have unwanted processes in the background. And I additionally think, one should be careful in terms of privacy anyway.

To sum up

So .. good
- backup and restore
- good disk layout supporting fast and reliable backup / restore and
a tool that turns down a little bit the background activity
is a very good basis for you to have no issues with any - maybe not so good upgrade - of Microsoft
until it is fixed.

I am currently in the perfect situation, that I still have HW that supports Win7.
So I can still fully work with Win7 and evaluate any Win10 version that comes out.
I have two SSDs, one for Win7 and one for Win10.
The win10 upgrade installation is of very good quality.
So .. I maintain everything under Win7 (then you have only 1 time the work to install all applications).
Then I perform an Win10 upgrade installation and have a nicely running Win10 of any version I want.
Macrium supports me
- to clone Win10 to the second SSD for Win10
- to restore Win7 on primary SSD dedicated for Win7

This way I can work reliably on Win7 and observe Win10.

When there are no updates anymore for Win7 then I can change my strategy.

Work on Win10 and if it has issues
- either restore Win10 backup with Macrium in under 10-15 minutes
- boot Win7 and work there, Win7 has not these issues as it gets only security backups (I parametrized Win Update this way)

Good planning makes your day in IT

At least the last 3 upgrades caused some hassles for customers up to loss of data.

Sorry, I save here and then not to loose something of bigger texts.
So you might need to reread my previous post in this thread (#2).

Another advice. In terms of PC HW maybe better stay with Intel when it comes to audio.
I am not sure whether Ryzen 3000 is good for audio.

For Cubase customers it turned out last year, that Windows 10 can priotize only up to 32 channels/threads with MMCSS.
Customers with CPUs having more than xx cores had to enter a special Registry setting, which had to be kept under Microsoft NDA by Steinberg (sad). Under Win7 it was still possible to priotize >65000 threads. I think this is maybe a product political thing that Microsoft wanted to push Windows Server for certain applications (audio is only a small market).
Intel has more efficient working CPUs, so there you get performance out of fewer cores.

Not knowing Protools under Windows and MMCSS .. but it could be the case for you having still an advantage with Intel CPUs and performance by fewer cores and along with this higher Single Thread Performance.

Also the DPC latencies unter Intel were usually lower compared to AMD in the past.

If you order the PCs from a dealer raise a requirement, best written / confirmed, that the audio tuned PC needs to have low DPC latencies, more specific system with very low kernel timer latency values.

You can measure this with LatencyMon with an idle system, no applications running !!!

Kernel latency timer needs to be able to come down under 20 microseconds with recurring peaks of under 100 microseconds. Lowest kernel latency time for me, which the CPU sometimes reaches is 1.95 microseconds.

Whats the purpose you might ask .. ?!
This reflects that the system can immediately react on a synthetic load by LatencyMon checker and is not busy otherwise, by other processes, badly written drivers and energy saving settings in the BIOS.

I tell that because in the past I had a badly designed board which has 180 microsecond latency timer but not below.
You need to avoid to get badly designed HW / BIOS for audio which has near realtime requirements.

These are excellent values from my system under Win7 to put an example:

Some explanations according to that you will find on the home page of the vendor of this product, the free version is enough: https://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

If you do not care about that .. fair enough. If you want optimum results (what was always my personal goal and driver) then you need to walk the extra mile.

Apple is more a black box, either it works or not. You are fully dependend on Apple.

With Windows based systems you have flexibility and the opportunity to choose on your own and to get excellent results if you put efforts into it or buy from companies, that did the finetuning already for you in terms of HW selection, driver selection and to check whether all runs fine for audio.