Onboard & Discrete audio, cracking / disk activity

[AbRASiON]

Hi All.

Having an incredibly obscure problem which is hard to diagnose, I'm hoping maybe someone else has had similar and knows a solution.
If I run AS-SSD benchmark (or open Firefox with like 40 saved tabs) my audio will pop or crackle. This is with onboard Realtek or my Asus Xonar DX.

I have tried many things to fix it and I can't nail it, my details as follows.
Asus P8Z68-V (one of the first revisions)
i7 2600k
8gb DDR 3
Onboard audio and Xonar DX
ATI 5850 card
OCZ Vertex 3 240gb4
Win7 64 SP1 with patches


Problem occurs through front audio jack on case with headphones (onboard only) or rear jacks for both cards.
It's not the headphones or the amp, I've eliminated those
I've flashed the SSD to latest bios and the board.
I've cloned the SSD to a regular HDD and booted, same problem.
I've tried the Intel SATA3gb port on the board or the 6gb, no change
Occurs with CPU overclocked or not

Popping seems worse on the Xonar, popping also seems worse in youtbe videos than winamp. AS SSD benchmark will generally end up producing a few within a few seconds though.
Sidenote: Audio through front jack sucks on the onboard, audio through rear jack on the Asus seems better - incase anyone ever finds their onboard audio too noisy.



I'm lost at this point, maybe it's the SATA cable or some kind of interrupt thing? could be a faulty board but I'd expect bluescreens and crashes - my only fault is this, it's otherwise very stable.

Any ideas? I really can't think of much. (don't think I have any free PCI-e slots but I'm going to try moving the card if I can next, after that,... whut? :/ )

 

[AbRASiON]

Moving to the other PCI-e slot has done nothing for the Xonar :/
Disabled a heap of BIOS options.
Hyperthreading, C1E, C6, AHCI, other disk controllers (Jmicron, Marvell)
Problem persists.

 

[sm625]

Can you change the IRQ line for the sound cards? Maybe it is putting the sound card(s) on the same IRQ line as some other high bandwidth device. Oh then there's DMA. A DMA request on the SATA might take priority over the audio, which may cause the DMA transfer to the sound card to be interrupted in flight. I dont know if you can change DMA priority or even the DMA channel on the sound card driver, but that's what I'd attempt to do. Can you try a regular pci sound card?

 

[MrTransistorm]

You might have a driver (video, LAN, etc.) causing high DPC latencies. Here are a couple of tools to test with:

LatencyMon

DPC Latency Checker

 

[Sebec]

Shot in the dark here, but could your surge protector have failed?

A while back I was having audio crackling issues. The protection on the surge protector was down, as indicated by a light on the protector (although it was still able to deliver power). Replaced it, and the sound issues went away.