Hey everyone. Brand new here and I am basically in despair mode.
I have tried everything i can think of and i am not sure how to fix this.

I game at 4k120fps & record with OBS at 4k60fps.

The issue:
I'm experiencing some clicks or pops in my recordings during speech. Everything has been working flawlessly for 7 months when i first built my system, up until about a week ago.

There's like a short "click" or "pop" sound which seems to manifest randomly when i am speaking into the mic, not tied to plosives, clipping, or loudness.

If it helps, because I record with 2 audio tracks (gameplay + voice), the glitch happens in the microphone audio track. It can happen twice in a sentence, once, or not at all, but it usually happens.

Also it's worth mentioning that the speech quality is otherwise excellent.

Here's my setup:
Microphone: Shure SM7B
Interface: Vocaster One
Headphones: Sennheiser HD600
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D (stock settings)
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090
RAM: G.SKILL TRIDENT 64GB DDR5 (EXPO Enabled)
STORAGE: 2x Samsung 990 Pro SSDs (2TB)
OS: Windows 11 Pro (fully updated)

What I've already tried:
- Tried with a new high quality, shielded USB-C to USB-A cable for the interface.
- Tried connecting the interface to multiple rear USB ports on the motherboard.
- Performed a clean reinstall of Vocaster Hub and drivers (including full registry/device cleanup).
- Increased buffer size in the HUB from 192 to 256 samples.
- Not a live monitoring issue because i've muted hearing myself in Vocaster Hub.
- Tested the SM7B with a different XLR cable — no change.
- Clean Installed Latest NVIDIA Game Ready Drivers without NVIDIA HD Audio.
I've heard that newer NVIDIA Drivers increase DPC load, especially in combination with USB Interfaces.
Some game developers also suggest that people with 40 series cards install driver versions that date toward the end of 2025 just before the 50 series launched. I tried that but i didn't see much success.
- Ran LatencyMon (here's where the juice is i think) and you can see the results in the screenshots below.

1. This is the first test i did. I believe this is after i switched to the latest studio drivers.
https://imgur.com/a/uiCzzFN

2. Here i switched to the 566 version of NVIDIA game ready drivers from december 5, because it's the last one before the 50 series cards released.
https://imgur.com/a/LrcExZ6

3. Here i switched to the latest NVIDIA game ready driver AND I also updated my BIOS to the latest version.
I also let LatencyMon run for longer.
It looks like there are like 4 drivers above 1ms high execution time.
In the previous ones, the main offender seemed like it was wdf01000.sys
but in this one, it seems OK?
It's also worth noting that up until this point the OBS log was saying "max audio buffering".
https://imgur.com/a/Awd08xl

4. I did a fresh install of OBS (cleared all settings too) and did another 15 min gameplay test session.
This is the first time latencymon gave me a green light and the latency seems normal.
Yet, OBS log still reports max audio buffering and the glitches are still there.
https://imgur.com/a/TWsmq12

I am just not knowledgeable at all when it comes to all of this, so what's my best course of action here? I don't understand why this is now a thing when it wasn't for 7-8 months.