After Effects stuttering, lagging, distorting audio

Hello,

I've struggled with a weird problem for a while now.
After Effects user interface is lagging a lot when working aroung in there. For an example working with keyframes or moving elements around on the preview panel or moving the layers in the timeline... Pretty much everywhere. Even in a project file with only audio file added to the timeline the UI lags... and during preview the audio is having a static effect.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled the software. Updated drivers for graphics card, external sound card etc. Tried different settings in Preferences > Preview, Media Cache, Audio hardware etc. Nothing has worked so far. Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Premiere all are working fine. The problem only occurs in After Effects.

I have the latest AE version.
Processor AMD Ryzen 7 5700G with Radeon Graphics
Installed RAM 64 GB
GeForce RTX 3070 8GB, latest NVidia Game Ready drivers
All of the hard drives are SSD.
Win 11
PC less than a year old.

On my older computer with lower specs there's no such issue, which makes it really confusing.

Have googled my eyes red. This is interrupting the workflow a lot.
Please help! Thank you.