Melkor

I updated the BIOS and all good so far.

Excellent, will try it then. Fingers crossed!

But this is for 7X70... that was the model that had problems with BIOS 1.18.

Anyone brave enough has tried the new BIOS?

Anyone knows any way to complain to Dell's support organization. You won't believe the hoops I had to go even with 'Premium Support Plus' so they could agree to send me a motherboard, which of course is a totally overblown response to fix a software bug, but the thing that irks me the most is the way they made me follow the same checklist over and over and over. I have a full log of my interaction via WhatsApp, it is both horrible and hilarious at the same time. I would prefer to never have to go through something like that again.

Sorry to hear that. I've read somewhere there are some incompatibilities present in the USB3.2->USB2 implementation on the chipsets. That would explain the problems you report. First google search results in https://support.elektron.se/support/solutions/articles/43000572280-compatibility-issues-with-usb2-usb3-and-chipset-problems Maybe if you have an USB2 hub it is worth a try (I've had more problems than solutions with this, but my hubs were a Thunderbolt connected monitor and a TB16 dock, both of which produce drops during playback which I don't have when connected directly to a USB port).

I've had success in reducing audio drops (to be inexistent, really) disabling "Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling" in Graphics settings on Windows 11. It was a pain, now it is much, much better. I'm using a Focusrite Solo and an Arturia MiniFuse without problems.