Soltek mobo onboard AC97 sound is scratchy

[trevdak]

I recently bought myself a Soltek motherboard (SL-865Pro2-FGR) with onboard sound. It came with the AC'97 sound driver. I'm running Windows XP on a 2.4 ghz pentium 4 with 1 gig DDR and an NVidia Geforce 6800 gt vid card.

My sound is very scrtachy on my computer. If I sit and listen to music, it sounds fine, but if I instant message or open another program, the music would slow down and be very scratchy hwile the program opened.

So, I'm thinking that my processor is doing what my onboard audio should be doing, because using my processor at all causes a nasty slowdown.

The driver on the CD that came with the mobo is from 7/1/2004 and I have been unable to locate a newer driver.

Any advice on how to fix the scratchyness would be appreciated.

 

[trevdak]

Additionally, I plugged in my old SoundBlaster Live chip and it clipped... I would hear a second of sound, it would then go back 1/4 second, and continue on, then go back another 1/4 second, and continue on, etc.

 

[DanDaMan315]

Originally posted by: trevdak
onboard sound

Onboard sound sucks, period.

 

[trevdak]

i realised that the clipping i was getting with my soundcard was due to the fact that i hadn't uninstalled my onboard audio driver.
Doing so left me with sound that was scratchy whenever I used my processor or did HD I/O.

 

[trevdak]

this issue is still unresolved. Any help would be nice

 

[trevdak]

Could it possibly be something to do with an IDE configuration? I have 3 IDE ports on my mobo, have my CD drive as master on IDE 1 and HD as master on IDE 2, and no other IDE devices

 

[sniperruff]

it may be because of your hard drive under heavy load.

 

[trevdak]

My hard drive worked fine before...
any ideas on how to fix an overloaded HD, should that be the problem?
I switched my sound card to another PCI slot so that it didn't share any IRQs
The problem was not resolved.

 

[dbailey]

so it works fine when listning to music, but when your computer accesses the hard drive, you get choppyness. I think you can increase the priority of the process for music in XP. Do a search in help in windows to see if you can increase it so windows dedicates more resources to the music. Also, make sure you have the dma check box enabled for the hard disk in device manager(and that your master / slave settings are good on the disks attatched.) Got an 80 pin cable not a 40 pin cable attatched to your hard disk right? Good luck

 

[CrispyFried]

See if you can change interrupts around in the bios.

 

[trevdak]

dbailey the problem isn't just with music. Another example is when I use gaim. It records log files and plays a sound when i receive a message. It does both at the same time, causing a little skip in the message sent/received sound every time i receive/send a message.

I did some research on the DMA thing and will be back in a few minutes with results.

 

[trevdak]

dbailey, you hit it on the head with the DMA thing, it appears my problems are solved. Thank you so much.