Sound Chugging

[keroppilee]

My specs are
barton 2800
asus a7n8x
1 gig corsair xms ram
audigy 2 using latest creative drivers


When i play mp3s and also do other things(some intensive i.epening up device manager , some not i.e.:just surfing the web), my mp3's will chug and sound terrible. I suspect the harddrive. Im using an old quantum fireball that only does pio mode. It's an ata 66 though. Ive been goin crazy trying to find the reason that my near cutting edge computer cant even keep my mp3's going smoothly. Is there any suggestion as a test to find out what is causing my sound to break up? I use either winamp or foobar to play my mp3s. Any help would be appreciated. Ive already checked many of the basics, the irq is not shared, the audigy is not in the first or 5th pci slot, it is the only pci device, and my vid card in the agp slot.

 

[jackschmittusa]

Are you using an 80 conductor data cable for the drive? Is the ide controller set for dma in device manager? Consider a new hard drive. It only takes one slow component to throttle a "near cutting edge" computer. A Ferrari with a flat tire isn't much of a performer.

 

[AbsolutDealage]

Ya, I second that. If you dumped that much money into a proc and ram, drop $100 or so and get yourself a nice UDMA drive with an 8MB cache.

You essentially upgraded every component in your system except for the slowest component of all... Do yourself a favor and get rid of that drive!

 

[keroppilee]

Thanks for the advice. But could the hard drive really cause the chugging Im trying to fix? I have an 80 pin cable and windows is set to dma if available but my hd apparently cant do dma... it's stuck in pio mode. Ive tried removing the primary ide channel and letting it reinstall but still pio.

 

[jackschmittusa]

If you are trying to multi-task, your cpu is demanding a lot of data from the hd. If it can't meet the demand, the data stream will be interupted.