Some questions upfront
Do you run on battery with the Laptop or does it also happen when the Laptops PSU is active ?
Is the BBF Pro powered by USB bus or do you use a PSU ?
Regarding the Windows installation
What release of Win10 ? 20H2 ?
Is this a system preinstalled from factory ? Some preinstallations are pretty bad.
Some tools are programmed bad and can have impact on the performance.
Typically such add-on tools to check for BIOS or driver updates, fan control, battery control.
I know this from a friends Lenovo Laptop, the factory installation sucked performance much, so that even the mouse moved reluctantly. And the built-in SSD chip which should act as Hibernation and Harddisk accelerator was badly installed. Missing driver and wrong sizing to be able to perform both tasks and to speed up disk accesses.
Did you use tools like O&O Win10 Shutup to disable not required background services and transfer of telemetry data / user behaviour ?
Before making any changes to the system:
a) Try to find out with which simple reproduceable steps you can trigger the issue to be able to measure, whether a certain change solved the issue or how much better or worse things became by this. It needs to be reproduceable and measurable to come to good findings and solutions.
b) Make a backup (disk image) of the windows installation first, recommended here is Macrium Reflect 7.3, do not get 8.0 it's too fresh was just released and has the typical ".0 release" issues.
As mkok noticed: measurings with LatencyMon can be very useful should this have to do with certain drivers that block a CPU core for too long.
You could try the following usual things
1. Check in the RME driver settings whether you have USB transport errors.
2. Try a different USB cable for comparison to be on the save side, that this is no cable problem (unlikely here but try)
Check cables and connectors has always been a good advice in the long history of IT..
3. try all USB ports on your PC to catch all possibilities (ports from chipset, ports from 3rd party USB chip)
4. does it make a difference if you use a higher ASIO buffersize?
5. check whether the energy profile "High Performance" gives more stability
6. make adjustments to the energy profile:
- disable Diashow
- disable selective USB power saving
7. if running USB bus powered, then try whether a power supply gives more stability
8. If Destop PC (here "Intel BIOS notation", for AMD the naming is different=
try disabling C-States (either disable or set to C0/C1)
try disabling EIST to achieve a stable non changing clock, but set TURBO then you get usuall 100-200 MHz higher clock
9. Disable CPU core parking for the power profile (can be performed differently, easiest with ParkControl from Bitsum)
10. Give the Processes a fix & longer time quantum to work more efficiently on all processes, to reduce context switches
In the enhanced system settings change Processor scheduling to "Customize optimal performance for background services"
Some of these tips address hopefully the specific problem, some are generally useful. I would in a 1st round only try whether ONE of these options make a difference to get an idea whether changes in a certain area change, mitigate or even solve the issue.
But its not always guaranteed, that a single change does the trick, in the next round I would perform all changes, sometimes the sum of all changes solve an issue.
In a bad case of luck your Laptop does not work well.
The difference with such a RME interface is
- has usually a higher amount of channels, so more audio data needs to be transported per time interval
- RME uses potentially other more performant USB transfer modes and something in the laptop does not perform this well
because also chipsets can have issues ..
Create a vanilla reference installation with minimum amount of drivers and software and compare ...
Either on a separate external SSD with only the Microsoft drivers and the most important drivers for the laptop
- chipset driver
- keyboard / mousepad driver
- USB3 driver (if any needed)
- network drivers LAN/WLAN
- display driver
- RME driver
If you have a quick backup disk then you can also quickly change between two different Windows installation by quickly restoring the one or the other disk image. Macrium Reflect can do this very well.
Macrium Reflect has here a very unique feature called Rapid Delta Restore.
On my system it takes only 4 minutes to restore changes between today and yesterday on a 1TB SSD filled with 700GB data. A full restore takes otherwise 1h15, so this saves me 1h10 !! It's a great feature.
Also very useful to reliably get rid of installed software that turns out to be problematic or that you do not want.
Good luck, something like this is always a nasty problem and Windows as well as Apple are not designed as real-time operating system. BIOS and driver quality is always challenging for audio related processes with near-realtime requirements. He it seems to be even a special case, as this seems to happen over time. So I am curious whether it has something to do with Energy settings and USB power saving settings or to get a dedicated PSU for the BBF Pro or not ...
BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub14