I would disable turbo boost as a separate action to know whether that is causing the problem, and if it isn't, keep it. You get a huge boost in performance from it.

In the motherboard manual, if you can download a pdf, find the share slots page...take a good look at what slots share with each other, an dwhat is also on those shared assignments/device/chipsets/hard drive controllers...ect ...and try to move things around so less shares of vital gear is accomplished by putting cards into the right places, with the least amount of conflicts or shares.
 
Most builders, or most often people making PCs are putting a video card into the first slot, and has been the x16 go to, in past technologies, as only one availble.
 
newer boards offer more x16 slots now, not just one.
So depending on what shares with what, one can move things so as to not allow too many things sharing one bus or IRQ interupt line for the cpu.
 
I would start there and progress forward...slowly adding....and turning off things in bios to free up some things shared you will not be using...that are on those slots if so.
 
check this:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Help-with-slot-assignments-with-Motherboard-and-irq-sharing-m3192463.aspx
 

Thank you everybody for the helpful advice and suggestions. I've already tried a number of things suggested here and I will eventually try more as time permits. I ran Latency Monitor and it came back with some very troubling results which I will include in my next post. With this post I'll try to answer all the questions that have been asked.
 

robert_e_bone
I am not at all sure which tweaks you did to your system - perhaps you could provide a list.

 
The tweaks I've done are the ones recommended here: http://us.focusrite.com/a...for-audio-on-windows-8
 

robert_e_bone Also, I looked up the specs on your motherboard, and it looks like the USB ports on the back panel are combo ports - USB 3/2. IF you are plugged into one of these ports, I wonder if you might have strange behavior, as many/most audio interfaces still seem to be engineered to work best with USB 2.0 ports.

 
My audio interface has always been plugged into one of the USB 2.0 ports. 
 

robert_e_boneAlso, can you please tell me what Driver Mode you run with in Sonar?  WDM? ASIO?

ASIO.

SplatIn regards to mix control was it a clean install or an upgrade from a previous version?

 
It was a clean install.
 

SplatWhat does "crashes" mean can you be more specific?

 
Hmm, now that you ask, I am not even positive that the program has crashed on this computer. I do know that the audio starts breaking up and then the audio engine stops, but I can't remember if the program has ever crashed when this started happening. My memory might be confusing it with my laptop, which has the exact same problem with the sound breaking up and the audio engine stopping, only it locks up and crashes on a regular basis--but that's to be expected because it's an under-powered piece of junk.
 

brundleflyThat could be the whole problem right there. This is a long-discredited tweak:

 
Thanks for that info. I've switched scheduling back to 'Programs'.
 

KylotanAnd I assume this is happening with the USB network device completely unplugged? (Networking over USB is usually a bad idea for performance, partly because it has to interrupt the CPU so often.)

 
Yes, definitely. I only plug it in and connect to the internet when I have to update programs. Whenever I am recording it is unplugged and disconnected.

I ran Latency Monitor and it came back with some surprising and alarming results. I really don't know what to make of it just yet. Hard pagefaults averaged about 2000 a minute. Every time I ran Latency Monitor it was a different file that resulted in an unusually large number of hard pagefaults. This particular time it was svchost.exe.
 
The program also found problems with DPC routine execution times and identifies Wdf01000.sys and dxgkrnl.sys as the two biggest culprits, both of which happen to be Microsoft Windows files. However, everytime I ran it, these problems didn't get detected until Latency Monitor runs for quite a few minutes (up until that point it says my system is suitable for recording audio), which makes me wonder if it's only a coincidence that every time the audio starts breaking up it's only after I've been playing for a few minutes.
 
Here are a couple screenshots:
 
 
 

 
I really don't know where to go from here. Does this point to a hard drive problem? Faulty SSD maybe? Or maybe I should try reinstalling Windows? I really don't know. I just want to get back to making music.
 

Page faults sound like memory problems.  I've had very strange problems with a system  that were extremely hard to track down, until I finally ran a memory diagnostic.  It was bad memory, on a brand new machine.

Actually, make sure all your memory is seated and recognized by the computer and OS.  Then run memtest overnight.

While it is possible that bad memory is a potential issue, that high number of page faults could also be attributed to an antivirus program doing real-time scanning of every file that is accessed. That means, every sample that gets loaded gets scanned. If you haven't installed any AV software, then make sure you have disabled Windows Defender. It is really stupid sometimes. On the other hand, if you have installed AV software, you should try disabling any real-time monitoring, or disable the AV software altogether to see if the problems clear up.
 
Regards,
Dan
 

Wdf01000.sys is windows driver foundation pointing to drivers
Googling dxgkrnl.sys points to mainly display adapter driver issues. I would try putting in a display adapter card maybe you can borrow one.

Also if you have any Intel utilities running remove them (check in add/remove programs). There seem to be a lot of complaints related. Straight away get rid of Intel proset monitoring service for instance.

Also disable Microsoft malware protection I see running.

Cheers...

Ok, I ran MemTest86. My memory passed all tests except for Test 13, the row hammer test. I did some web research and found that it is extremely common for recent DDR3 memory to fail this test. The testing detailed here (http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/dram-row-hammer_kim_talk_isca14.pdf) shows that over 80% of all memory tested from three different manufacturers failed this test. Evidently the memory I have isn't perfect but I am not sure that it alone could cause the problems that I am having.
 
After running MemTest86, I ran Windows Memory Diagnostics Tool. It is still running--has been running for about sixteen hours now--but it hasn't turned up any errors as of yet.
 
Here are the results from MemTest86:
 

Splat
Googling dxgkrnl.sys points to mainly display adapter driver issues. I would try putting in a display adapter card maybe you can borrow one.

 
Could you possibly elaborate on this a little? My Monitor plugs into the DVI-D port on the motherboard. I don't have a separate graphics card. I'm not sure exactly what kind of display adapter card I should get to test this out. Could you maybe post a link that shows a kind of adapter that might be suitable for testing this?
 

Splat
Also disable Microsoft malware protection I see running.

 
Eh... I actually only enabled Windows Defender and the firewall after you recommended in your first post that I turn my firewall on and keep my antivirus running at all times. Windows Defender is the only antivirus on this machine. I'll turn it back off for now and only enable it when I plug in my wireless adapter to update software.