That's interesting. I mean - majority of IPRs are pretty unstable to say at least
In my case - I don't have such issues with FIRE, to be honest. It does crashes sometimes, but Arnold does it too.
Every IPR .. and well, render engine, has its bottlenecks, which when reached - software doesn't know how to behave (or not enough of resources, etc) so it crashes or hangs.
So this is just something to keep in mind before you push the preview button (read: FIRE) - for instance FIRE doesn't really like a displacement, or when you constantly adding / deleting the objects. Or when adding / removing lights. Fire is good for working with geometry / lights that you already have. Like tweaking the intensity, changing the colour, material properties and so on.
I'm in Maya on iMac Pro - and everything works pretty fine here so far. Maybe it's not the Maxwell, but rather some of those naughty "dlls" that windows is famous for
)