Abit NF7-S v2 sound crackling, looping, skipping...

[ITPaladin]

When I got the NF7-S v2 and stopped using my Creative SB Live, I found that I did not know what to set in the game sound options what setting to use.

So far that I remember, I have been presented in my games (EQ, EQ II beta, Rome: Total War) that I have tested the problem in with the options of:

Miles 2D (positional?) audio
Dolby (surround)
Surround
Creative EAX 1.0 or 2.0

I have the most problem with the sound in EQ/EQ II beta. In my short run in Rome: Total War, it was not as pronounced.

I first was running the system with 512 RAM and an ATI 9600XT. I then upgraded the RAM to 1 GB thinking maybe I was just too low since EQ takes alot of memory, and I run two instances at the same time sometimes.
Well I ran one instance of EQ with 1 GB and still find the sound problems.

I download TV shows and watch them no problems.

The board is only a couple months old at the most; bought from Newegg.

I'm about to stick my old SB Live in since this gets annoying, especially with the voices in EQ II beta.

My HD is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 Ultra ATA 66 (40 GB, 2 MB cache, 7200 RPM).

 

[merk]

i just recently had a similar problem, although i had the problem when playing videos also but only if the cpu was busy. In my case it turns out the hard drive controller dropped down to using PIO mode, which uses the cpu when accessing the hd. I guess between that and having to do the sound it couldnt keep up.

Perhaps something similar has happened? if you go into hardware manager, look at the properties of your IDE controllers. See if i any of them are using PIO ... they should be using DMA.

If it is using PIO and its already set to use DMA is available, then the way i corrected it was to delete the ide controller from hardware manager, reboot, and let windows re-detect the ide controller.

What speed CPU do you have? Maybe the machine is just too slow to handle the sound when you are using something cpu intensive like a game.

 

[ITPaladin]

Both controllers say DMA if available.

The only change to my system was the upgrading of the motherboard and not using the SB Live anymore.

The games haven't changed.

I have 1 GHZ Athlon Tbird.