After I recently reinstalled my entire OS and had my fitted with a new Sandisk SSD system drive and a Zalman fan, I've been having some weird issues with my audio interface. I am using Cubase 6.0.7 x64 under Win7 pro x64, with Steinberg power scheme activated. Every now and then (a few times a week, which I find too often to be normal), Cubase gets a serious ASIO time usage spike, which seems to come out of nowhere. It then happens that Cubase loses its connection with the Fireface. In the past this has happened every now and then but not nearly as frequently as lately. Usually this was fixed by reloading the fireface asio driver in Cubase. But now things seem to be more severe: Cubase loses all communication with the fireface, reloading the driver doesn't help, and when I check the fireface mixer there is a weird kind of jittery audio (something like: "prrrrrrr", it sounds like a audio clock pulse) that is being sent out though one or more random outputs. This sound isn't coming though my main stereo outputs but random other analog outputs. Today I was happily mixing, then suddenly a large asio time usage spike happened, so I highered the buffer size on the rme interface. To my surprise, the reported latency in cubase's device setup (vst audio system) was not automatically updated, which I believe usually does update automatically when I change the buffer size on the rme. I am very worried about these problems, I've had this sound card for 5 years or so. In all this time it has never let me down and I really like it. What could be the problem and how can it be fixed? Please help...

Some further specs:

-Win 7 pro x64, service pack1, fully updated
-mobo Asus P9x79, updated to latest bios v 3501
-16 gig Corsair Vengeance CMZ86X3M2A1600C9G
-gigabit 82579v ethernet adapter (my pc is almost never hooked up to the internet though)
-graphic card Nvidia Geforce 520
-onboard sound: nVidia gf119 and realtek alc892 (but these are disabled in device manager)
-CPU i7 3960x