AE PERFORMANCE NIGHTMARE - Good PC, Perfectly Optimized. What is going on!

I've been fighting with AE for quite some time now. I've saught help from numerous editing friends, adobe themselves, hours of my own research and still no luck. 

The Problem:

My little M1 16gb ram macbook runs CIRCLES around my windows rig... Even trying to preview raw untouched 4k 60 footage straight out of my camera in after effects TAKES AGES. We're talking 5 minutes just to ram render 5 seconds to watch in real time. It's so bad I generally run Premiere Pro AND AE at the same time just so I can preview the footage smoothly and just copy my cut up sections respectively. I'd say general AE performance overall is slow, I'm not sure if this is just limited to preview. AE runs much smoother with 1080p footage of course, but even still I think my little macbook runs MUCH faster. I have reinstalled AE multiple times as well, this doesn't fix my issue either. Is there something I'm missing? Could it be a conflict with one of my plugins making AE run slow? I am going to share my machine specs, software, AE settings everything I have so see if maybe theres something wrong there. 

My thoughts:

I'm thinking this is a low storage issue somewhere. My 240gb SSD that windows is installed on is the C drive, and it only has 45gb of storage free. Since it's the main drive, even though I have my disk cache sent elsewhere I feel that there's some kind of background temp files being made to store project data or something that's filling that drive (but not actually) and it's causing everything to run slow. I have AE and my other adobe apps installed on my slower 4TB Bulk Drive because of all the stuff it comes with, keep in mind no performance issues on any of the others to my knowledge, but there's still alot of data adobe grabs and shares from that C drive and the NVMe for disk cache. I could potentially move AE by itself over to the NVMe as well and see what that does, but I'm deathly terrified the move is going to make me lose an old animation preset or something important I cannot afford to lose. It's taken me years to get a good workflow and set everything up how I want it. Having to restart from scratch would cripple me more than just dealing with the slow AE to begin with, so that's really not an option for me. I hope SOMETHING in here sparks someone's ears that had this same issue, please help! I make videos and edit almost every day of my life, If my AE just ran right I could get things done in a day or less instead of weeks. Thank you!

PC Specs: 

Ryzen 9 5900x

64gb Corsair Dom Plat DDR4

RTX 3070Ti

2TB NVMe SSD - 750gb reserved for disk cache

4TB SSHD Bulk Storage Drive

240gb Normal SSD for windows

- I use thunderbolt 7000mb/s External hard drives to store my footage, as I move from my windows PC to my mac quite frequently.

AE Settings:

- Previewing footage in 1/4 Resolution

- 64gb of ram reserved for Adobe, 10gb for other apps

- Enable Multi-Frame rendering ON (I have messed with this ON and OFF, it runs much MUCH better with)

- 750GB Disk Cache on NVMe Drive

- Conformed media cache on 4TB Bulk Drive

Prerequisites:

-Latest Nvidia Studio Drivers (Always keep them up to date)

-Experimented with multiple AE versions, same problem across all. Currently on AE 2023 ver. 23.5

-Windows up to date

- Disk Cache gets cleared/purged every time I open AE

Background Programs Running:

* I generally try to keep down on my background programs, but heres what I usually have running - Closing out of all of that stuff has zero effect.*

- Display Fusion (Multiple Monitor Background Thing)

-Geforce Experience/Nvidia Stuff

-Discord

-NZXT CAM (Monitoring & Cooling)

-MSI After Burner (I fine tune GPU fan speeds when editing sometimes)

- Creative Cloud

- G.SKILL Trident Z Lighting Control (RAM RGB)

-Gigabyte Xtreme Gaming Engine (Motherboard RGB)

-iCUE  (Corsair Keyboard RGB)

AE Plugins (Same Issue with & without plugins installed)

- Shake Sauce

- Flow (Graphing Plugin)

- LA Forge

- Boris FX Sapphire

- Twixtor 

- RSMB