I upgraded my DAW. I have an ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe gen 3 motherboard with 16 GB of ram running 8 cores at over 3 GHz and 2 solid state drives. My sound is through FireWire with a presonus 16.4.2. I have followed the system tweaks advised by the various DAW sites including Avid (running pro tools 10 along side). However, I have frequent drop outs. It has become better by lowering the number of buffers and changing SONAR X2 so that it runs in above normal priority.

Is my system too fast? Should I undo the tweaks? I thought that after updating my 3 core AMD system, 2.x GHz, standard drives and only 8 GB of ram that I would be cooking but instead it is worse.

I followed Sweetwater's Win7 tweaks on my old Audio PC and found the performance was actually worse. I undid them and all was well again. I've read a few times that Win7 handles audio pretty good on its own. Only tweak I've done on my new PC was I changed the power settings to "High Performance."

Maybe I missed it somewhere, but what operating system are you using? And 32Bit or 64Bit?

Not really necessary any more with either Win 7 or 8. Of course you can if you want to but it does not make a great deal of difference. Not like it used to with 98, XP and Vista.

I also use a Presonus, but only when we play out, it is the hub of our PA system. Anyway, when I set it all up I read that the FireWire chip used to talk to it was critical. Make sure the chip on your MB is on their list of "known to work" interface chips. If it is not find a FireWire expansion card that uses the right chip. I have a vague memory about reverting to a legacy FireWire driver too, I had googled around and there was a known issue with the latest FW drivers in Win7. When set up the Presonus works VERY well. I run the PA from a Sony VAIO all in one PC that only has an i3, I can stream all channels for recording and only consume 5% CPU using a high quality 16 foot FW cable, no dropouts. Best of luck!

what is the Pro tools doing when you record?? same results?  besides ASIO buffer size, is there a setting for firewire driver latency?  and like ref'd above, is the firewire on the mobo or add-on card?

The two chips (firewire) that could be considered in the "generically working" category would be the Texas Instruments (or more popularly known as TI) and the Agere. Most others do need to be confirmed as working from end users.
 
EDIT: Although the older firewire 400 that these chips use is fast fading away, so how relevant it is now or int he near future is probs doubtful

Geo524
Only tweak I've done on my new PC was I changed the power settings to "High Performance."

Related to this is Intel Speed Step.  My system isn't all that weak, but if I enable Speed Step in my bios, I get poor performance and the latency monitoring programs tell me my system is underpowered.  When disabled, I have no problems at all.
 
Setting things to High Performance may be doing the same thing.
 
 

Another thing to consider is that many "tweaks" actually remove built-in dynamic functionality, and lock it to something more "static." Be very careful in what is being tweaked, and understand what that tweak is actually doing.

My OS is 64 bit Win 7