.....and by the way, my build has a Gigabyte MB also.

Blix: good day ..please download cpu-z and install it and then post you gigabyte motherboard model

How do I run latencyMon?

http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon_using
 
The free download is in the left hand column on that page (under "System Monitoring Tools," LatencyMon 6.00).

With sweetwater optimisation please do not change processor scheduling to background services and please please please do not run blackviper tools. Also when they say antivirus wont play nice with daws as a rule that advice is simply wrong (they don't even go into excluding file paths) although there's nothing wrong with avg etc like they state.

I also haven't unticked windows sound to be controlled exclusively by apps. Not sure about that one to be honest.

This thread is full of good advice, mostly of the "do nothing" variety. Windows is pretty good for audio these days, and cakewalk have closely collaborated with MS for a couple of decades. Between those two things, you can mostly relax.