OP. Not sure if you solved this yet or not since it's about 4 months old with no action now, but if not then I wanted to share my own experience. I have the same sort of problem with the Gigabyte z87-UDH5 board, but I may have found a fix for it. I'm also running windows 8 and I have a core i-7 4770k, with 16GB of 2400Mhz RAM so I know it can handle real time audio.
The NICs that are installed on mine (there are 2) are intel gigabit NICs. I went into the driver options under the Network and Sharing Center -> change adapter settings where my adapter is the active one and made some changes to how the NIC uses the CPU.
Basically, I disabled or lowered the values of two fields in the driver that are hitting the CPU with interrupts every time it needs to process a packet. The fields you're going to be looking for are RSS "Receive Side Scaling". This offloads some of the processing to your CPU and "scales" it to multiple cores at once. The reality is that this is generally not needed with your i7 3770 (mine is the i7-4770) as one core of this processor can handle the line rate that you're using in most cases. The two options on my drivers are RSS Queues (default is 2. I made it 1) and I took the "load balancing/multi-core" feature on another RSS setting down to almost nothing. Also, you need to make sure that TCP offloading for IPv4 or IPv6 (based on whichever you're using) is turned on in the driver. This keeps some of the TCP from going to your CPU. (for negotiations I imagine)
This relieved me of all of my popping and crackling associated with what feels like latency. And any sound application is performing as it should now.
The reality of the situation is that your NIC has an ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) that can handle your bandwidth without robbing your CPU to do all the lifting. Now, it's true that you still need to hit the cpu to do some layer 3 routing stuff, but you're probably not using this at 1Gbps true line rate anyway. If you're like most people, then you have a broadband connection that's under 50Mbps to the real world and you don't need to hit your CPU so much (or on all cores at once) for routing in that instance.
Also, if you have a media server that you're using to stream stuff on your local network then just make sure that your PC is in the same subnet so you don't have to route and can just do a layer 2 switch to the device for your payloads. Then your application can use the CPU and not your NIC driver for interpreting the data.
I hope this helps you and anyone else that's looking for a solution with the Gigabyte boards. Incidentally, it also sped up my system quite a bit in other tasks. Oh and if you're wondering if I took a network hit on my internet, the answer is no. I have a 30Mbps line that I pay for and I still get all that speed to the outside world. I don't run any internal streaming, but I imagine that it would be fine too.
