Thank you for your informative instructions. I’d like to take the liberty of commenting and adding a few things.
[1] “MSI” in MSI mode utility does NOT refer to the well-known motherboard manufacturer, but is an abbreviation for “Message Signaled Interrupts” (details in [2]). This means that the instructions apply in principle to other MOBO manufacturers such as ASUS, Gigabyte etc. as well as various PC hardware (processors, video cards, …).
[2] MSI mode is an alternative communication technology for the PCI bus that avoids the disadvantages of traditional IRQ processing. These are mainly characterized by delays in signal forwarding when an IRQ line is used by several physical devices (shared interrupts).
[3] In addition to the option of activating MSI mode for a PCI device (“msi” column), the MSI mode utility also offers the option of adjusting the interrupt priority in 3 levels “Low”, “Normal” and “High”, as well as “Undefined” (system controlled). The interrupt priority determines which of several pending interrupts are processed first. Basically, the setting is about prioritizing time-critical devices (such as audio card, video card, disk controller) and deprioritizing non-critical devices (network, unused devices).
[4] An additional, helpful application in this context is LatencyMon. LatencyMon checks to what extent a system under Windows is suitable for processing real-time audio, among other things. At Cubase running, simply start the program and click on the green triangle “Start Monitor”. The performance is then checked and the result is displayed. In the line “Highest reported ISR routine execution time (µS)” the “bottleneck” of the system is shown; if needed and possible, MSI and high priority should be set here in any case.
https://www.igorslab.de/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/MSI_util_v3.zip