TL; DR

Connect your sound card to a USB hub with an external power supply.

The long story

A few months ago I changed my computer. The new one is high-end: it has a Ryzen 9 7950X processor and an Nvidia RTX 3080 GPU. Finding a motherboard was not easy: all the models compatible with that processor have a lot of compromises (or prohibitive costs). Eventually, I took an ASRock B650 PG Lightning with its pros and cons.

Everything is powered by a BitFenix Whisper 850W PSU, which has good reviews on many specialized sites.

The system is very stable with Linux: it can sustain several Firefox builds consecutively for hours without batting an eye.

Sadly, I cannot say the same for Windows, which I use almost exclusively for playing games. I often had blue screens of death with the DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION error.

When I analyzed the dumps with WinDBG, I noticed the Komplete Audio 6 driver was always in the stack trace when this happened.

I tried to contact Native Instruments for help, but they were super unhelpful. I even asked them to make the driver open source since it is an old product they do not care about anymore.

I especially feared an incompatibility between the platform and the sound card. Another hypothesis was that the repair job on the USB port I had to do a few months before was faulty. However, the problems being only on Windows was very suspicious.

I had this problem with multiple games, and it also persisted after formatting. At a certain point, I noticed that the sound often started crackling before crashes, which I knew happens when missing samples.

Then, one day, I got the same symptoms on Linux when listening to a video while using Blender. I did not have a system crash, but the audio was so bad that I could not understand the words anymore.

That was the confirmation that the problem was very likely hardware. And it was happening under similar circumstances: high load on the GPU.

My first instinct was to use a shorter cable: the cable I had always used was 3 meters long, so I wondered if it was a length problem. But it did not change anything.

After a while, I gave up but decided to keep the short cable anyway. However, I connected it to the hub of my monitor, which is self-powered, to place the device on my desk again. Suddenly, the problem disappeared.

RTX 3000 cards are notorious for having power spikes. Moreover, I turned on phantom power as a requirement of my microphone: this may make the sound card quite power-hungry. Probably, the two things do not play well together, but isolated power sources fix it.

I have kept this configuration for some weeks, during which I did not reencounter any BSOD.

Fun fact: I was so fed up with the situation that I even tried to buy another soundcard from another brand, but the Italian Posts lost it 😓️. At least I was refunded, and, eventually, I solved the problem.