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200Mhz FSB too fast for ISA soundcard. Is this possible?

S

SOS

Member
Hi,

I've been having trouble getting my AWE32 ISA soundcard to work properly with digital audio on my ABit KT7-RAID. Is it possible that the FSB is too fast, thus causing problems?

A report from Sandra said something along these lines. I'm getting popping noises when I play digital audio, so I was wondering if this could be the problem?

Thanks

SOS

 
Don't get it wrong, currently K7 bus still runs at 100MHz but at double-pump rate. The "200MHz" is misleading because 100MHz DDR is only equal to "200MHz" in bandwidth but not in actual clockrate or latency.
 
Your FSB is correctly set and is therefore not a problem.

What graphics card do you have? Bad graphics card drivers are a common cause of popping sound.
 
I've got a LeadTek GeForce2 MX. I've used the old LeadTek drivers I got on the CD, the new ones from their Website, and the Nvidia Detonator drivers. All the same result.

The problem only occurs with 16-bit audio, and not 8-bit, which I find pretty strange.



 
No, first off, as ahfung explained, there really is not a 200 Mhz FSB. Second, the ISA Bus is a derivative of the FSB just like the PCI bus is. If you are not overclocking the FSB, and the motherboard is working correctly, the sound card should have no problem in an ISA slot on that machine.

More than likely it's something related to the sound card drivers or configuration. Perhaps Windoze is trying to make it share an IRQ with something else? Did you go into the bios to 'reserve' a specific IRQ for that legacy device?
 
Well, guess what it IS 200 mhz Bus. The CLOCK is 100mhz but DATA appears on the BUS at the leading and trailing edge of the clock signal. If you look at the bus signals with a scope, you would see no difference between them if they were clocked by a 200mhz clock using the leading edge only, or 100mhz clock using leading and trailing edges. Don't confuse the CLOCK with the BUS.
 
What is Windoze?

I've seen IRQ reports and nothing else seems to be using IRQ 5. I've done that "Legacy ISA" in the BIOS, and tried the memory hole thing. I've tried various driver versions, but it hasn't changed anything. This card has worked fine on my other two old systems, so that's why I'm putting the blame on the motherboard.

Seems like something that can't be fixed.
 
I highly suggest just throwing that old thing away and get a sblive value oem or a cheap(but still good) turtle beach sound card
 
windoze, is just windows...

what version of windows are you running?
is the card being picked up correctly. Have you tried another isa sound card in your motherboard?





 
SOS,

Little bit more info here. You say you have problems with Digital Audio, explain more. Is this playing Audio Cds, WAVs, MP3s what. Can you play Audio CD's with digital set off in Multi-Media. (Analogue Mode).
 
I'm using Windows98 SE.

The card is causing no crashes, it just doesn't work properly. MIDI works fine. CD-Audio works fine, but I can't test the digital mode because my player is too old to support it. WAV files, and MP3s (digital audio) have these bad popping sounds when playing at 16-bit. That is the problem basically. The strange thing is that if I play an 8-bit .WAV file, there is no problem.

I've used this card in other systems with Windows95 & 98 with no problems.

I have an ABit KT7-RAID, Duron 600, IBM 75GXP, GeForce2 MX.

Thanks for any help, it is appreciated.

SOS
 
the popping is most likely a result of the PCI bus not giving enough time for the ISA bus. try increasing the PCI latency (I forget the actual name) to around 64 or so.
 
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