Advice & Update on sound problem w/ KT7A RAID...experts???

[TRD]

Hi, this may be a long one but thos who are experts on this board please read and comment....

In earlier posts I described my problem. TBIRD 1000 running stock on KT7A RAID....SBLive 5.1 512 meg PC133C3 Kingston ValueRam. RAID 40gig ATA100 WD drives IDE 3 & 4.Cambridge surround digital speakers

I noticed that after a good install, upping 4in1 4.28a and HPT370 latest drivers.... when I play MP3 i get sporatic momentary pauses/or drops in sound. I defragged, checked for SBLIVE driver updates, tried different MP3 players... nothing solved it. These drops usually occur when I may be opening another program or performing another task..... so there is a "hit" somewhere but with the usage meter and checking resources with a variety of programs, my resources are not being abused and my CPU strenght is still quite high.

I found this same skip occurs with VCD as well. I tweaked my BIOS with an abundance of seeetings from ICONCENTRIC.com and other such sites...

I also tried clean installs with minimum drivers...both 98 SE and Win ME....still occurs. Last resort last night was to connect an 8gig Seagate ATA66 to IDE1 (or 0 depending on how you look at it) and fdisk, format and install..... figured MAYBE it was a HPT issue..... STILL THE SAME PROBLEM!!!

This HAS to be a VIA chipset issue as I never had this happen before on my BE6II with a P3 600, 256meg PC100 ram. Its frustrating as I really do alot of MP3 and I dont want this to ruin rips and transfers to my NOMAD JUKEBOX..these toys are way to expensive to not work PERFECT.

Last note....Ive updated to the latest Beta BIOS as well to see if it helps...Ialso modded the BIOS to be able to DISABLE APCI and still no better.

Thanks for reading and offering suggestions as Im quiter disillusioned with this setup and UNFORTUNATELY you all know the return policy for CPU and motherboard is non Existant for the most part..... so Im stuck otherwise.

 

[Tako]

My suggestion first is tell us what PCI components you have installed - and in which slot from top to bottom. It may be an IRQ conflict of some sort or IRQ sharing problems with certain PCI devices.

Also, it maybe a good idea to go into the BIOS and assign IRQ 5 for legacy devices. This seems to rectify the IRQ-related problem with SB16 emulation that Live! use.

Beyond that, we need more information about your system to troubleshoot your problem.

Tako_chu

 

[TRD]

Thanks for the reply.....For the troubleshooting phase I have clean installs on a system with ONLY a SBLive5.1 (in slot3) and an AGP Voodoo5500. I have disabled the com2 port, the floppy controller, and the Parallel Port. I also have the only available drivers for the SB Live 5.1 installed and SB16 disabled, no DOS drivers installed. As far as I can see, there are no IRQ or resource conflicts. I have tried other slots but am willing to try again if any one has any suggestions.

I have tried to adjust my virtual memory but it didnt help. I have tried to adjust "Conservative Swap File" tweak in system.ini...again no help. I have the WZ.03 BIOS also installed and have a modded version to effectively disable ACPI. (the problem was persistant even on the unmodded BIOS)

My HPT370 drivers are the latest BUT this problem also occurs when I use the regular IDE channel. I am playing MP3 from both CDROM and HD (defraged) and i get the momentary skips. I also have the audio skips with VCD on silver pressed VCD not copies. I havent tried a DVD yet as Im trying to troubleshoot on a minimally setup system... minimal drivers.

Thanks again everyone. (someone emailed me suggesting I try adjusting CPU priority in Winamp..I will try at home BUT that doesnt explain how it happens in Media Player, Napster MP3 player, or Creative Jukebox... or does it explain the BVD sound skips either...)

 

[Tako]

Hmmm. Sounds like the skipping occurs when the system accesses the hard drive or the CD drive (loading programs, streaming MP3 files, etc.). I'm not too keen on RAID setup so I can't help you there, but how about the DMA settings on the HDD & CD-ROM? Are they enabled? Also, if you happen to reinstall the OS again, try installing the SB Live drivers and the vid card drivers only. Don't install the VIA stuff yet. Then try the audio stuff and see if the problem still exist. In other words, use the default IDE drivers from MS (also you might want to make sure that DMA is enabled).

Hope it helps.

Tako_chu

 

[the FooL]

I had a similar problem with a KT7-non raid, but it was momentary pauses system-wide.

Found out that it the board didn't like GF2 cards.
Main reason I didn't switch over to the KT7A, since I don't know if the problem is solved or not.

Have you tried with another soundcard/video card combination, if you have them?

 

[TRD]

Hi All....

I just got home and am about to embark on this journey to figure the darn thing out...... (b4 the wife gets home and wants to go out... yuk :-( I wanna play!!)


I brought home an Ensoniq PCI and another SB Live.... this time an XGamer.... Im gonna try the different cards and see what happens. I also was thinking MAYBE there is something going on with the system when it converts the audio to digital out to the Cambridge Digital Surround speakers?????

OH YEAH.....tako, Im doing all this with ONLY the audio drivers installed (nonSB-16 legacy) and the VIA chipset updates....

BTW.....how can I be sure DMA is set for the RAID setup? I assume it is as in the RAID BIOS, my drives are autodetected as UDMA5.

 

[DioCassius]

I had a very similar problem in winMe with my kt7a, although i have a soundblaster awe64. The sound would slow down and become garbled any time there was harddrive access. I haven't figured out how to fix it in winME, but i can tell you i have had no problems in win2k. maybe you can give that a try.