You can at least test the legacy driver.
We have very good experiences with the Delock Firewire card and Windows 10/11:
https://www.delock.com/produkt/89153/me … tml?g=1114

https://www.studio1productions.com/Arti … wire-1.htm

Since Windows 7 the recommendation was so far to use the Legacy driver in the firewire driver's settings in Windows Devicemanager. Simply try both and use whats better.
More important is, that Windows has no firewire driver anymore and you need to install this driver to get a Firewire driver, no matter whether you finally use the legacy setting in the driver or not.

A 2nd important point is to use a good firewire card. Recommended is still to use a card with Firewire Chipset from TI (Texas Insruments). But careful here, also TI release one Firewire chipset that is known to behave wrong, because there were design errors in the chip in terms of interrupt handling. Unfortunately many cards have been built and sold with this bogus chipset. Avoid the XIO2200A.

See also https://forum.rme-audio.de/viewtopic.ph … 74#p121374
Use a translator if needed.

Awaiting your results. This could be helpful for some.

It is only a rumor that new Windows versions no longer have a FireWire driver. 23H2 and even the DEV versions have it anyway.

When I get the chance, I'll check which FireWire cards I have installed. But every PC system can react differently. Ultimately, only trial and error will help. And Audio AG Support has already made a suggestion.

At this point I think I can summarize my findings using a PCIe firewire card (Vantec UGT-FW210) with the TI XIO2213B chipset on Windows 11 Pro:

Using the default Windows 11 OHCI compliant driver:

• Unstable with frequent IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL BSODs.

Using the "legacy" OHCI driver (downloaded):

• Only FF800 on the bus: Stable running for 24 hours without a crash.

• FF800 + UAD-2 daisy chained: Unstable with frequent NO_MORE_IRP_STACK_LOCATIONS BSODs.

It's also worth mentioning that I was using the 800 port on my PCIe card and did not test the 400 port (yet).

It took the OP until post #11 to disclose that a UAD-2 is used in parallel. It was never disclosed which version. Now it seems it's a UAD-2 Satellite FireWire. Such info should have been part of the first post.

Maybe primalsound or other folks read it, just had a few thoughts on this topic.

I remember successful firewire installations under Windows 10 using the legacy driver from this site (URL already posted above): https://www.studio1productions.com/Arti … wire-1.htm

As Windows 11 doesn't deliver any advantage only less performance (by the IMHO bad kern virtualization security design) and more restrictions for the user (forced to use online accounts) I would propose a downgrade or even parallel installation (dual boot) with Windows 10 and test whether it works better. Win 11 only offers 1 month more until also going EoL. So there is no real reason to invest money and time into Win11.

It could even be, in your case, that the audio problems could be caused (besides other possibilities) by this loss of performance. I am not sure whether you did a Win11 installation using "Rufus", where you can disable things like the need for TPM and kern virtualization entirely.
It should be obvious that Windows 11 is a major disaster performance wise, if Microsoft blocks 6+ year old CPUs to install Windows 11. Even my performant Xeon E5-1680v4 is on the blacklist (which cost €1750 around 6 years ago, for me now €150 on eBay).
Remember, this is the CPU which runs this artificial DAW load test: https://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/Ent … cks-de-en/
So you can possibly guess what of a bad security design this is, which makes very performant CPU required to run Win11.
In short: such an Operating System like Win11 (vanilla installation) is a bad OS for Audio processing with near-real-time requirements.

As a foundation, I would use a proven card with a proven TI chip which is known to work, as also TI released bogus chips (e.g. XIO2200A), but the good working one worked are said to work significantly better for audio than other vendors cards. So even if a VIA based card just works for now I personally would not be sure whether this is the case on the long run and better invest into a TI card which wor

This card I used myself long time ago when I was using an UFX with FireWire.
Exsys EX-16415, 3x FireWire 800/1x FireWire, PCIe x1 (TI XIO2213B)
https://www.exsys-shop.de/shopware/de/k … le-bracket
https://www.amazon.de/Exsys-15-06-2257- … B0029M9O72

Side note: at this time I thought (biased from other forums) that FireWire would be better than USB until I realized that this is not the case, at least not for RME drivers. It was even an advantage to get rid of FireWire, as firmware updates could only be transferred using USB for the UFX and any other device having USB and Firewire (like UCX).

Thank you ramses and WernerB for taking the time to respond with your recommendations and feedback.

I know this (firewire FF800) is ultimately a deadend. I have several setups in my studio and on my mac side I'm doing great, and on the PC side I was hoping to postpone the $2k+ investment for a little longer.

I hear you on Windows 11 and possible performance issues, which over time are bound to get better. But crashing is a different proposition altogether.

Thanks for the Startech PCIe card recommendation, WernerB. I will probably get it just to see how it compares. Interestingly the pcb layout is identical to my Vantec card.

I'm sad to hear that. The card works on my socket 1151 board without any problems.

At least worth a try, maybe on a 2nd SSD for tests, as there seem to be solutions for this:

1. According to this thread on Reddit, there appears to be an option to tweak the power plan to prefer the P-cores: https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments … _i_13700k/

"[...] im using ,default balanced powerplan for regular use and this settings for forced p core mode,.(like gaming)

set balanced powerplan,
download "powersettingsexplorer" app (~40KB in size) https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/windo … ty.416058/
1)enable- heterogeneous policy in effect - "use policy 0"
2)enable- heterogeneous thread scheduling policy -"prefer performant processors"
3)enable- heterogeneous short running thread scheduling policy -"prefer performant processors"
>apply
"

This is also mentioned here in the documentation of Bitsum (company developing parkcontrol and process lasso pro):

https://bitsum.com/docs/how-to-keep-pro … f-e-cores/

2. Alternatively use Bitsums parkcontrol to customize the "Heterogenous Thread Scheduling Policy"
https://bitsum.com/parkcontrol/

3. Also Bitsums Process Lasso Pro has some interesting settings.
https://bitsum.com/

I think Win10 plus these customizations are worth a try, even for Intel big/little type of CPUs.

And regardig Windows 11:
I would definitively deactivate kern virtualization. What steals performance so dramatically that Win11 can't work on older processors anymore, should be disabled for computers performing audio processing with near real-time demands.
For any new installation: with Rufus you can tweak an installation medium to disable this and also the necessity of TPM.
https://rufus.ie/

Glitches may be due to big.little CPU architecture.... You may try to switch off e-cores or use Lasso SW to set affinity of CPU cores.

But sure, the source of glitches may be caused by other things....