I have also heard some have better results with older Nvidia drivers on their systems.
There are probably much more precise ways to approach but there's a bunch of blind troubleshooting you can do to rule out whole areas.
Try a different DAW first to rule that out, then you could disable your audio interface and try a recording using built-in audio port only.
If the problem persists you could disable your network adapters (all...) and any firewalls/antivirus and try then. After that, you could remove the nvidia card and try with on board graphics, if you have that option.
If it's going to take 30-40 minutes to show an issue that's a few hours work so...fair enough if you don't want to.
This is all on the assumption that your setup once worked fine, and that you're testing with a blank session - One audio track, no effects or virtual instruments.
If all of that yields nothing or you don't want to go down that road, consider running a memory test for a few hours at least.
Specific processes taking longer than expected would be a real red herring if there's any kind of hardware failure at play.
Well, if you stay off the internet, and only connect to check/download updates for your DAW and plugins, or upload bounces to your favorite sharing site, then you probably don't need any antivirus running all the time. A periodic sweep (I do it on my wife's PC a couple times a year) with MalwareBytes is not a waste of time....
Can anyone recommend a good antivirus for an audio workstation? I'd rather not leave my machine unprotected if I can avoid it, even for short periods. I've been using Avast for the last little while. Before that I was using Panda, but it messed up my firewall protection and I had to switch.
Recently I have started getting very bad problems of latency. These may be connected to the Windows update...
The Fall Creators Update does mess with drivers. I had several that were deleted or corrupted, and one was not compatible with the update - had to install an earlier version to fix. Unfortunately, you probably won't know of these problems until something 'suddenly' doesn't work after the update - as appears to be the case here. In my case, my system slowed to a crawl until I re-installed or repaired my drivers.
Not sure if this will help you, but worth a try.
Hit your Windows Key > type 'app' > Return > left-click your driver > Modify > Next > Repair > follow through..
As I keep saying, I get the latency problems even when the DAW is not running and the machine is more or less idle. I can see it in Latencymon.
I'm not quite following...if the computer is idle...what is experiencing latency?
IOW...something would have to be running for latency to have meaning.
This is by definition a resource problem. The video about CPU power and real-time processing is very relevant to your situation. It doesn't matter how much gHz CPU, how many cores/threads, how much RAM, SSD speed, etc. is in the box. What matters is whether when a process needs something, i.e., a resource, to get a job done within a fixed amount of time, it is able to do that. Your system apparently is not able to keep up with the demands of audio processing, which specifically must complete certain tasks within a time frame (because of buffer size allocations, among other constraints).Well obviously the machine is never truly idle, but what I mean is that I'm not doing any heavy lifting whatever. I am letting the machine sit there and do its own thing while I go away and have a cup of tea. And when I do that with Latencymon running, Latencymon tells me that I get big delays in interrupt to process latency, ISR routine execution time and DPC routine execution time. When I have my DAW running, even with no demanding plugins and few audio tracks, these become very obvious as dropouts.