• Registered: 2026-01-25
  • Posts: 2

Topic: Fix to stop PCI-E firewire card from crashing, Win11 B450 mobo

Hi all,

I wanted to make this post to possibly help other people struggling with firewire in their pc on Win11.
I bought a Startech PEX1394B3LP with the TI XIO2213B chipset. I have had good experiences with Startech stuff.

After installing the firewire card I started getting random crashes. My PC was always rock solid before and knowing RME's reputation the problem had to be the firewire card. The problem was the PC would freeze up, not leaving any crash logs. Every now and then all I could see was a WHEA CPU error in the event viewer. But this could be anything.

I installed a PCI-E riser cable to move the firewire card away from my GPU and motherboard, I thought maybe interference from my GPU was causing issues but that didn't help.
One day I felt the PC starting to crash and quickly hit reboot. That finally generated a crash log and after analysis with WinDBG it gave the error: SINGLE_DPC_TIMEOUT_EXCEEDED

After some research it seemed that a PCI-E device was taking too long to respond, and that the cause could be some sort of energy saving routine on PCI-E devices. I checked my bios but all the energy saving options were off, so I started checking windows options. There I found it:

Open Control Panel via the search bar --> System and Security --> Power Options --> Balanced power plan Change Settings --> Advanced Settings --> PCI Express --> Link State Power Management --> Set it to OFF

No more crashes now, 3 weeks stable.

Stupidly if you go through normal Win11 settings you don't find these options, you have to go through the older Control Panel.

My system is a MSI B450 Mortar Max motherboard with a AMD 5800X3D. Win11 Pro 25H2. The firewire card is still on the PCI-E 1x riser plugged into a PCI-E 3.0 8x slot running through the chipset. All latest drivers. GPU is a 7900XTX. I am using the normal firewire Texas Instruments driver from windows, not the legacy one. I tried that and it made no difference. I even ordered another firewire card with a VIA chipset but everything seems cool now.

Hope this helps some people. I am very much enjoying the FF400 and Totalmix. One day I'll get a UCXII for the dynamics processing.

Cheers,
Ted

2 Reply by ramses (edited by ramses 2026-02-04 18:17:25)

  • ramses
  • ramses
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  • From: UTC+1
  • Registered: 2012-10-14
  • Posts: 15,207

Re: Fix to stop PCI-E firewire card from crashing, Win11 B450 mobo

Hi Ted.

Welcome to the RME user forum.

Thanks for your report, and this is indeed something that I disable in all of my energy profiles because of a gut feeling that energy saving for USB and PCIe is possibly not a good thing.

I mentioned these settings also in this blog article how I performed my new installation of Windows 10.
https://www.tonstudio-forum.de/blog/ent … lts-en-de/

Nice to get feedback from you that this can indeed help.

And yes, it's a pity that the new config menus in Windows 11 are missing such functions.

BR Ramses - HDSPe MADI FX, M-1620 Pro D, 12Mic, UFX III, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, Nuendo 14, Win10 IoT Ent
  • ramses
  • ramses
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  • From: UTC+1
  • Registered: 2012-10-14
  • Posts: 15,207

Re: Fix to stop PCI-E firewire card from crashing, Win11 B450 mobo

Ted, one more thought on this.

It looks like you were using the wrong power plan for audio processing.
The “High performance” power plan has both
- USB selective suspend
- PCI Express – Link State Power Management
disabled, whereas the “Balanced” plan has both enabled.

Personally, I would disable both settings in all power plans anyway, just for peace of mind and predictable behavior.

BR Ramses - HDSPe MADI FX, M-1620 Pro D, 12Mic, UFX III, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, Nuendo 14, Win10 IoT Ent
  • Registered: 2026-01-25
  • Posts: 2

Re: Fix to stop PCI-E firewire card from crashing, Win11 B450 mobo

You are probably correct now in 2026.
But when 5000 series Ryzen was released the Balanced plan ensured proper use of the dynamic CPU speed and also reaching boost clockspeed. (I like games also)

AMD recommended Balanced.
They probably fixed that by now so now I guess you are correct.

It's just stupid this parameter is not easy to find.

One clue that led me to this was an ad for a Firewire card that stated it had updated it's design to account for 'Low-Power PCI-E'.
I guess some manufacturers changed the design to account for Link State Power management.

Anyway, rock solid now. My system goes to sleep and Hibernate as it should. No downsides to changing the option.
Thanks for the response.

Ted

  • From: Valencia, Spain
  • Registered: 2024-04-18
  • Posts: 135

Re: Fix to stop PCI-E firewire card from crashing, Win11 B450 mobo

Hi Ted

First off all thanks for sharing your personal experience, this builds community smile

Tedski wrote:

AMD recommended Balanced.

I haven't followed the latest developments in CPUs for years, but since I've been an AMD user with the Ryzen 1000/2000/3000 series and now with the TR 2950X, I've always used AMD Ryzen Balanced Power Plan (included with the Chipset Drivers package) and selecting High Performance via Windows Settings due AMD's recommendation under Win11, and if I remember correctly, starting with Ryzen 5000, you can use Windows High Performance plan ... at least what I'd read from Staff in AMD official forum.

It is not my intention to contradict you or start absurd arguments, but please correct me if I am wrong ...

Tedski wrote:

It's just stupid this parameter is not easy to find.

+1

This configuration should be accessible from Windows Settings, but it seems that MS announced years ago that it would be removing the old Control Panel. These days, we're still in the same situation, we'll see. At least we have a good reference here in the forum.

All the best

Toni

UCX II FW106/36/104 v1.276 TM1.99 - PC Win11 25H2

6 Reply by ramses (edited by ramses 2026-02-06 13:30:29)

  • ramses
  • ramses
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Re: Fix to stop PCI-E firewire card from crashing, Win11 B450 mobo

I think for near-realtime audio tasks you should always select the High-Performance power plan from Windows, no matter which Windows version, to
a) Get the highest CPU clock speed
b) prevent CPU clock changes
c) Disable CPU core parking entirely
d) to disable USB and PCI power-saving settings

I am not sure whether the information from the internet is correct, that the AMD modified power plan would do the following:
- Reduced core parking
- Allowed faster frequency changes
- Improved responsiveness and gaming performance
- Still kept power usage lower than “High Performance”

Reduced core parking means to me, that it is still active but at a lower percentage, that maybe fewer amount of cores are being parked. But .. if an audio related task is being scheduled to a parked core, then you get latency, if the core needs to wake up first and this impacts the ability of your system much, to quickly process an audio related task.

Same for frequency changes. Frequency changes also create a little lag, because it takes a little time to be stable on the new clock speed. Therefore, I enable turbo in my Intel BIOS, which results in this system having a constant CPU clock. The combination of
- CPU core parking disabled
- permanent turbo speed (not max turbo speed but maybe 200 MHz more than base)
- Energy savings disabled (C-States disabled)
- CPU_SPREAD_SPECTRUM  disabled (to disable a little variance in clock rate to prevent electronic noise)
Is the best that you can do for best performance and to reduce DPC Latencies to the minimum.

For DAW operation you want max performance.
Maybe the AMD profile is worth it to save a little performance during gaming which is not that latency critical.
But for DAW work I would strongly recommend to get the highest performance and to deactivate energy saving.

BR Ramses - HDSPe MADI FX, M-1620 Pro D, 12Mic, UFX III, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, Nuendo 14, Win10 IoT Ent