Sound issues

[stevo1210]

My brother is going to kick my ass soon because his PC decided to be a bitch today. Worst of all, I'm getting the blame because I added RAM to it this morning.
So the problem is with the sound. It has been fine for months until this morning. The sound card works fine for only a few applications and ironically only Windows applications. Windows media player plays music fine and the windows start-up and shutdown noise etc. are fine.
But when my brother starts up a game, any game whether it is World of Warcraft or Call of duty 4, it will make this very loud and continuous droning noise until he exits the game. This also happenes when he plays a movie using Nero showtime or whatever else.
In my opinion I think it's a software issue. I don't think upgrading the RAM from 2GB to 4GB is the issue here.
The sound card is a Creative Soundblaster 5.1ch PCI, and the internal Intel audio has been disabled.

Here are the specs of his PC for reference.

* Intel Pentium Dual Core E2180 CPU
* Intel DP965LT motherboard (P965 chipset)
* 4GB RAM (2x Kingston DDRII 800, 1x Kingston DDRII 667 and 1x Corsair DDRII 667) All RAM is in a dual channel config, except running at only 667MHz due to the slower RAM speeds in there.
* Asus/Nvidia 8400GS 512MB PCIe graphics card
* Pioneer DVR-109D IDE DVDRW
* Seagate SATAII 7200.11 500GB HDD
* Windows Media Center edition 2005
* Thermaltake Mambo ATX case w/ 12cm exhaust fan
* Asus/ Delta electronics 350W 24 pin PSU
* Logitech X530 5.1ch speakers
* Creative Soundblaster 5.1ch PCI sound card
* Dlink DWL-G510 WLAN PCI card
* Logitech Media 600 USB keyboard and Logitech RX300 USB mouse.

I don't know what's wrong and I need a quick fix before my brother goes insane. I think he looked for drivers for the sound card today for an update and the newest drivers are from 2007.

Thanks.

[Scenic]

Re: Sound issues

um... are you using the drivers from Creative or the windows ones?

i've got a SB Live! Player 1024 and a SB Live! 5.1 ...

both of them bitch around with the creative drivers, but the windows ones work fine...

[kikkoman]

Re: Sound issues

increasing the PCI latency to 128 or higher might help.

[stevo1210]

Re: Sound issues

um... are you using the drivers from Creative or the windows ones?

i've got a SB Live! Player 1024 and a SB Live! 5.1 ...

both of them bitch around with the creative drivers, but the windows ones work fine...

I use the creative drivers as Windows XP has no drivers for the sound card itself.

increasing the PCI latency to 128 or higher might help.

How do i do that? Theres no PCI latency menu in the BIOS, or is it a Windows thing?

[kikkoman]

Re: Sound issues

How do i do that? Theres no PCI latency menu in the BIOS, or is it a Windows thing?

it's a bios thing. looks like they abandoned that setting.

at a quick glance google tells me that the audigy series had problems under EAX with 4gb RAM or more with older drivers, but no word about the older SB series.
not quite sure if this happens only on 64bit systems or with 32bit too.

what you can do:
1) use a different PCI slot and see what happens
2) remove some RAM (MCE can't use the full 4gb anyway) and see what happens.

[zandrax]

Re: Sound issues

Creative cards have an long history of troublesome drivers (usually good on Intel chipsets, but prone to crash on anything else) and sensitivity to PCI timings: increasing PCI Latency to at least 64 cycles helped in past to solve skipping audio in both playback and recordings, sometimes even cured BSODs due to driver crashes; however this doesn't seem to be your case.

Since it works with Windows apps and it's noisy only on DirectX ones (games, Nero, ecc), I suspect the DX config is corrupted or the driver is flawed.

Some Creative cards don't have an hardware mixer and DX default config is to enable the hardware mixer: games usually crash at first, but you can even get the annoying continuous hum. To solve it, run the Sound card test in dxdiag, reply to all "That's a fake bird chirping sampled at xxx Hz yy bits: did it shatter your eardrums? Yes/No" questions and lastly agree with dxdiag's proposal of switchting to a software mixer.

If doesn't resolve the issue, look for an updated driver: the 4 GB issue Kikkoman points out is plausible since the card looks an old one and in past drivers were programmed with fixed memory path in mind, usually between 3 and 4 GB (who could run such a sound card and have more than 512 MB of ram on its system?). Additional memory conflicts with these hardwired memory locations and you get troubles.
If the new driver from 2007 isn't effective, then remove the new 2 GB and check if the problem is present: if not, then you know the reason.

Zandrax

[stevo1210]

Re: Sound issues

I found the latency menu eventually in the BIOS and I increased the PCI Latency timer to 128 from the previous 32. Still no change at all.
This problem is very strange, after a restart of the PC, I can start a game for a few minutes and then it makes that very loud droning noise. But I can still play music using Windows media player etc. without a problem, so I think Zandrax is right, it's a DirectX issue. Except I don't know how to change it to software mixer to prevent this issue.
Problem is that I can't really get rid of the extra 2GB RAM my brother bought because it was quite expensive, but I can however remove it for a short while for a test, but it must go back in (Which I will do later). But the computer must have the 4GB he purchased otherwise he ain't going to be happy about it. He is a very heavy duty gamer and that 4GB of RAM is very vital I guess, and the graphics card is going to get the boot very soon as he ordered a 1GB Nvidia 9500GT which shall be coming soon.
I also tried to install a driver update for the card except it wouldn't accept it and said I didn't have the correct product yet I have downloaded the correct driver.... I even double checked the model of the Creative card as being a (SB0060 model number) Sound blaster Live! 5.1 PCI, exactly like this one .

Thanks.

[stevo1210]

Re: Sound issues

Oh, and I can't find a way to remove the Creative driver/software in the add/remove programs menu which is a worry as I need to get rid of them for troubleshooting.

[stevo1210]

Re: Sound issues

I finally found the application in add/remove programs. For a short and temporary time my brother will use the onboard Intel audio until I can find a fix for the sound card somehow.

[Wizard]

Re: Sound issues

Stevo, DUMP the creative! And find alterative audio card.

And, cut your brother's pc back to 3GB if you can find pair of *matched* pair of 512MB sticks at DDR 800, NOT DDR 667. This is doing really stupid mixing the 2 different sticks in a bank, really asking for trouble.

I do not recommend keeping using older creative audio cards too long, they seems to be FIXED to specific eras and trouble some. I dumped them when I could not use 98 with a live! 512. crashed the 98 when intializing the audio card.

Cheers, Wizard

[bgavin]

Re: Sound issues

DPC Latency Checker

Check your DPC latency with the above tool. It is a standalone .EXE and does not install anything on your machine. It is part of my standard audit package.

This tool will tell you if you have DPC problems that will causing skipping and stuttering. Use it as you disable services to find the offending driver.

As noted above, the mismatched memory is a bad thing. Dual-channel memory timings are blisteringly fast, so you are well advised to match your ram. I will not mix different stick models in the same machine, nor will I ever mix different manufacturers.

I run 2x2gb in my primary workstation, and simply throw away the 0.6gb that XP cannot access. I have four slots, but choose to run two sticks. I've seen too much chatter about 4 sticks causing subtle problems.

24 hours of MemtestPlus should pass error free.

It's always a good idea to check your temps, too.
HW Monitor is from the author of CPUID, and it works well.

Creative Drivers have always been junk. Numerous tests with bus sniffers reveal they are bus hogs and do not play nice on a shared PCI bus.

[stevo1210]

Re: Sound issues

I managed to get the thing to run "OK" but now I only get sound through two front speakers because I haven't installed that 'special' Creative software. I only installed the driver through device manager and now it seems to be fine in games. But um, I now know it's a software glitch somewhere down the line. Now I just have to figure a way to make the 5.1ch sound option work.

[sofTest]

Re: Sound issues

If I remember correctly, the MCE your brother got are 32-bit, and the memory of all the devices will be located below the 4 GB limit. When your brother get his 1 GB video card, that will reduce the usable memory to 3 GB. All the other devices might use another 512 MB. As you can see, your brother might end up with 2.5 GB usable memory for programs anyway. If you got to pull 2 GB from the system to solve your sound problem, there might not be much of a loss.

[stevo1210]

Re: Sound issues

If I remember correctly, the MCE your brother got are 32-bit, and the memory of all the devices will be located below the 4 GB limit. When your brother get his 1 GB video card, that will reduce the usable memory to 3 GB. All the other devices might use another 512 MB. As you can see, your brother might end up with 2.5 GB usable memory for programs anyway. If you got to pull 2 GB from the system to solve your sound problem, there might not be much of a loss.

Yeah the Windows MCE is 32 bit and can only see 3.25GB of RAM. If I pull out 2GB can have remaining 2GB, isn't that less than the 2.5GB you specified?

[jpdoe]

Re: Sound issues

I would think the video card memory would be addressed through PCI registers, not trough the regular memory address bus.
In the interest of full disclosure, I don't fully understand the 3GB limit of 32bit CPUs. IIRC, it would seem the actual limit can be between 2.75GB and 3.5GB, depending on the motherboard/chipset/cpu combination.

[sofTest]

Re: Sound issues

Yeah the Windows MCE is 32 bit and can only see 3.25GB of RAM. If I pull out 2GB can have remaining 2GB, isn't that less than the 2.5GB you specified?

Yes less, but probably not noticeable. Please note the exact memory available depends on which and how many devices there are in the system.

[sofTest]

Re: Sound issues

I would think the video card memory would be addressed through PCI registers, not trough the regular memory address bus.
In the interest of full disclosure, I don't fully understand the 3GB limit of 32bit CPUs. IIRC, it would seem the actual limit can be between 2.75GB and 3.5GB, depending on the motherboard/chipset/cpu combination.

Actually, maximum memory available for programs can even be below 2 GB in a dual video card system. The memory "loss" on 32-bit Windows systems, is very well described in this link.

[sofTest]

Re: Sound issues

I just remembered the KX Project. They develop an independent driver for many Creative-cards. I tried their driver a few years ago on my SoundBlaster Live! Platinum card, but I uninstalled it as it didn't support all my needed outputs on the card. It seem to still being developed. My be the driver fits your needs?

[kikkoman]

Re: Sound issues

the kXproject drivers are great and i've been using them for years. awesome if you do audio stuff.

since stevo's brother seems to be into gaming, they may not be the best choice though. --and overkill as well.
the biggest issue is that EAX is only partially supported.... most games work fine but i've seen a few that required the original driver. swapping drivers is not a big deal, but could be annoying to stevo's bro.

[jpdoe]

Re: Sound issues

Thanks for the link, sofTest.