I'm writing this more for documentation purposes and in hopes that it helps someone lost on Google pages searching for a related case.
I lost basically all night dealing with a very simple problem, but all because of my stupidity, I ended up reinstalling Windows twice. Anyway, here's the story.
The symptoms began about 6 months ago when, after mounting my internals (including the sound card), Windows would randomly BSOD. I figured it was something badly attached to the slot so I inspected the computer and saw that the sound card was a bit misleading, not by much, but it was. Things went back to normal after that.
A month ago, when I got my latest upgrade (MoBo, CPU, RAM, SSD and VGA), after a full windows reinstall (cause of the CPU upgrade), the soundcard worked near flawlessly, but I could hear a few crackles every minute or so, and I only got rid of them by forcibly disabling the sound card's EAX effects. I don't use them, and they were all disabled, but the main switch in the sound panel was on (despite every single effect being off) and I figured that was the cause of the problem. It was.
But it was: the card was just dieing on me.
Last night I left the computer on sleep mode (which I never did after my last upgrade) while running Assassin's Creed III and I went out. After I got home from the pub I turned the computer on by pressing the enter key on the keyboard. Everything ran smoothly (and fast) and I kept playing for about 5 minutes before the system froze. The sound was on a loop (the last millisecond of sound repeating over and over), the screen didn't have any artifacts but it was frozen. No keyboard input, no mouse input, no nothing. Hard reset.
Booted the system up thinking it was probably a remnant of some bug from the sleep time, but as soon as Windows loaded, on the welcome screen, same thing. Kind of panicked a bit there. Hard reset again. This time I got into windows. Good. Started Assassin's Creed III. Freeze. I kept trying to see where the problem was for a while yet. I ran Counter Strike Global Offensive without problems, and everything was fine in Windows, until the PC froze on a simple youtube video. Well, I knew it wasn't the game, that's for sure, and I was down to a few possibilities:
- overheating issues (well, I knew it wasn't that): checked the fans, all working, and temps on RealTemp were more than fine
- faulty PSU: tested it with my multimeter a with some PSU diagnostics tool off the internet, all fine
- faulty RAM: tried to take one slot out, one at a time, and ran Windows' memory checker, all fine
- faulty graphics card (who knows, sleep and hibernation are somehow tied to the graphics card for some reason): ran a stress test, no error. Ran on the iGP, it would still crash when loading Assassin's Creed III, and even windows
- faulty SSD : SMART didn't point to anything so I figured it wasn't it
Apart from some motherboard failure or the CPU throwing errors (I did reset the bios though), all it could be, in my stupid little head, was Windows corruption.
The answer was obvious: format c:
After a windows reinstall, I played Assassin's Creed III just fine. I was just testing it, so I hadn't selected my Soundblaster as my audio device, so I was running it with no sound. But it was working so I figured it had really been a Windows corruption of some sort. SSD diagnostics still said it was all right, so I started configuring my Windows properly. When I got to the part of setting up the sound configurations, the computer froze right the moment I enabled the Soundblaster. It all came to me at that moment: the Windows start up chime, the youtube video's sound, the game's sound, even a ramdom error that had frozen the computer for no reason, it was obvious: it was the sound card.
With a mixture of satisfaction (because I had finally found the culprit - 6 o'clock in a Sunday morning - and because I new the rest of my system was fine) and sadness (because, even though I suspected the Soundblaster to be worse than the integrated soundcard on my motherboard, it was still my little bady), I took it off the motherboard and screwed in a nice vent-lid in its place, for the PCIe slot, hooked my sound system to the Z87-A's hole-ridden panel (the sound-card has 6 different ports, for a 7.1 system plus mic AND line-in - which came in handy for my two microphone setup that I couldn't use simultaneously before) and all was going well. I was planning on going back to sleep after setting the onboard soundcard up. It was working perfectly, even better than the Soundblaster, just with the Windows drivers!
But I made the grave mistake of installing the drivers Asus' provides in their site. And this is a fair warning to all Asus Z87-A users that use their realtek onboard soundcard: DO NOT INSTALL THE ASUS' DRIVER OR ANY DRIVERS AT ALL IF YOUR SYSTEM IS WORKING WITH JUST THE WINDOWS DRIVERS!!! Not only are they HUGE, they serve no real purpose (you can enable some effects, big deal) and they disable my keyboard's volume keys. As soon as I found that out, and after trying for ten whole minutes to restore that functionality, I decided to uninstall the drivers and go back to the Windows ones. No can do. It uninstalled alright, but Windows wouldn't let me use the soundcard after that. It seemed I was stuck to reinstalling the Asus' drivers (which did work, but with no volume keys on the keyboard) or having no sound at all. Again. The solution was obvious to me:
FORMAT C:!!!
Yeah. Went to bed at 9:30am, and just finished setting up the PC now. All's working perfectly and I have all my stuff. Even better, I have a clean(er) install and I dropped MSI Afterburner, which I was using for temp monitoring and FPS HUD in favor of RealTemp (that monitors the CPU temp aswell, on the tray bar) and FRAPs, which is nicer than MSI Afterburner.
Well, that's it. Now I can finally go back to playing Assassin's Creed III
Too long didn't read:
- don't use Asus' drivers for their Z87-A realtek soundcard
- don't be an idiot and reinstall your perfectly fine Windows install because you forgot to check one of your computer's parts for faults when your Windows freezes for no apparent reason.
Thanks for reading.
I lost basically all night dealing with a very simple problem, but all because of my stupidity, I ended up reinstalling Windows twice. Anyway, here's the story.
The symptoms began about 6 months ago when, after mounting my internals (including the sound card), Windows would randomly BSOD. I figured it was something badly attached to the slot so I inspected the computer and saw that the sound card was a bit misleading, not by much, but it was. Things went back to normal after that.
A month ago, when I got my latest upgrade (MoBo, CPU, RAM, SSD and VGA), after a full windows reinstall (cause of the CPU upgrade), the soundcard worked near flawlessly, but I could hear a few crackles every minute or so, and I only got rid of them by forcibly disabling the sound card's EAX effects. I don't use them, and they were all disabled, but the main switch in the sound panel was on (despite every single effect being off) and I figured that was the cause of the problem. It was.
But it was: the card was just dieing on me.
Last night I left the computer on sleep mode (which I never did after my last upgrade) while running Assassin's Creed III and I went out. After I got home from the pub I turned the computer on by pressing the enter key on the keyboard. Everything ran smoothly (and fast) and I kept playing for about 5 minutes before the system froze. The sound was on a loop (the last millisecond of sound repeating over and over), the screen didn't have any artifacts but it was frozen. No keyboard input, no mouse input, no nothing. Hard reset.
Booted the system up thinking it was probably a remnant of some bug from the sleep time, but as soon as Windows loaded, on the welcome screen, same thing. Kind of panicked a bit there. Hard reset again. This time I got into windows. Good. Started Assassin's Creed III. Freeze. I kept trying to see where the problem was for a while yet. I ran Counter Strike Global Offensive without problems, and everything was fine in Windows, until the PC froze on a simple youtube video. Well, I knew it wasn't the game, that's for sure, and I was down to a few possibilities:
- overheating issues (well, I knew it wasn't that): checked the fans, all working, and temps on RealTemp were more than fine
- faulty PSU: tested it with my multimeter a with some PSU diagnostics tool off the internet, all fine
- faulty RAM: tried to take one slot out, one at a time, and ran Windows' memory checker, all fine
- faulty graphics card (who knows, sleep and hibernation are somehow tied to the graphics card for some reason): ran a stress test, no error. Ran on the iGP, it would still crash when loading Assassin's Creed III, and even windows
- faulty SSD : SMART didn't point to anything so I figured it wasn't it
Apart from some motherboard failure or the CPU throwing errors (I did reset the bios though), all it could be, in my stupid little head, was Windows corruption.
The answer was obvious: format c:
After a windows reinstall, I played Assassin's Creed III just fine. I was just testing it, so I hadn't selected my Soundblaster as my audio device, so I was running it with no sound. But it was working so I figured it had really been a Windows corruption of some sort. SSD diagnostics still said it was all right, so I started configuring my Windows properly. When I got to the part of setting up the sound configurations, the computer froze right the moment I enabled the Soundblaster. It all came to me at that moment: the Windows start up chime, the youtube video's sound, the game's sound, even a ramdom error that had frozen the computer for no reason, it was obvious: it was the sound card.
With a mixture of satisfaction (because I had finally found the culprit - 6 o'clock in a Sunday morning - and because I new the rest of my system was fine) and sadness (because, even though I suspected the Soundblaster to be worse than the integrated soundcard on my motherboard, it was still my little bady), I took it off the motherboard and screwed in a nice vent-lid in its place, for the PCIe slot, hooked my sound system to the Z87-A's hole-ridden panel (the sound-card has 6 different ports, for a 7.1 system plus mic AND line-in - which came in handy for my two microphone setup that I couldn't use simultaneously before) and all was going well. I was planning on going back to sleep after setting the onboard soundcard up. It was working perfectly, even better than the Soundblaster, just with the Windows drivers!
But I made the grave mistake of installing the drivers Asus' provides in their site. And this is a fair warning to all Asus Z87-A users that use their realtek onboard soundcard: DO NOT INSTALL THE ASUS' DRIVER OR ANY DRIVERS AT ALL IF YOUR SYSTEM IS WORKING WITH JUST THE WINDOWS DRIVERS!!! Not only are they HUGE, they serve no real purpose (you can enable some effects, big deal) and they disable my keyboard's volume keys. As soon as I found that out, and after trying for ten whole minutes to restore that functionality, I decided to uninstall the drivers and go back to the Windows ones. No can do. It uninstalled alright, but Windows wouldn't let me use the soundcard after that. It seemed I was stuck to reinstalling the Asus' drivers (which did work, but with no volume keys on the keyboard) or having no sound at all. Again. The solution was obvious to me:
FORMAT C:!!!
Yeah. Went to bed at 9:30am, and just finished setting up the PC now. All's working perfectly and I have all my stuff. Even better, I have a clean(er) install and I dropped MSI Afterburner, which I was using for temp monitoring and FPS HUD in favor of RealTemp (that monitors the CPU temp aswell, on the tray bar) and FRAPs, which is nicer than MSI Afterburner.
Well, that's it. Now I can finally go back to playing Assassin's Creed III
Too long didn't read:
- don't use Asus' drivers for their Z87-A realtek soundcard
- don't be an idiot and reinstall your perfectly fine Windows install because you forgot to check one of your computer's parts for faults when your Windows freezes for no apparent reason.
Thanks for reading.
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