Hey Steve,
Nice link, that confirms my thoughts about the ASIO buffer signal flow. I believe that Presonus has a similar article concerning latency and signal flow, just maybe a little simpler. Its you look under their Audiobox VSL interfaces.
My system is very similar to what you were first describing there, except I’m on Vista. I’m having a helluva time trying to run sample based projects in Cubase, and though I maxed out my RAM slots with 2x2GB DDR2’s the 32bit OS is killing me by not letting me take full advantage of it.
Another thing to check out Knuckle is your computer’s power modes. Alot of times running on a powersaver/eco type mode will also affect latency performance. On my system, if the settings are switched from High Performance to Balanced, there is a very exact, reproducible overload of clicks/pops, etc.
Like I said earlier, MOTU’s drivers are very respectable and can achieve nice latency. I just upgraded my Steinberg CI1 to a Focusrite 8i6, and though the latter offers DSP software (which is helpful for recording monitoring), the playback latencies have to be set very high. If you go to DAWbench, you’ll see that their Saffire 6 interface was rated worst. In another thread on Gearslutz (which I found after purchasing the Focusrite) the same user found a 2i2 (in the same league as the 8i6) said its performance was so bad it was unratable!