Sound issues followed by bsod

[Avinash4]

Hey guys, over the past week I've been having an issue with my computer. After running for a few hours, I notice that my system's sound becomes extremely fuzzy and begins to break up, stutter and crack. After a while, the sound completely dies, and at that time, video also begins to lag. A few seconds later (I actually anticipate it now), I get a quick blue screen, and the pc reboots itself. When windows starts again, I get the "System has recovered from a serious error" message and the system seems to think that I have no sound devices installed, despite the fact they appear in device manager. The only sound I can hear is the beeps from the CPU speaker, and WMP/Winamp says I must install a sound card before playing media. If I shut down the computer for a few hours, and restart, things are back to normal, and sound works fine. But the problem re-emerges again every few hours.

I thought it might be faulty RAM, so I ran 5 passes of memtest86 1.7 and it found no errors. I've tried downloading the latest sound drivers from the manufacturer's website, but it didn't help. Also, I doubt it's related, but recently, my nvidia 6600gt graphics card just died on me, so I pulled it out and bought/installed a new ATI x1650 Pro. There were no problems for several weeks after the new video card was installed, so I doubt there's any conflict.

Any suggestions of what could be causing this?

System info:
ASUS A8NE Nforce 4 Motherboard
AMD Athlon64 3700+
ATI x1650Pro
Onboard sound (Realtek)

 

[Ghouler]

Just to check - is everything well when sound is off in bios?

nForce4 boards are quite known for causing problems with audio. For add-on sound cards it is recommended to adjust PCI latency setting via bios or using "PCI Latency Timer" tool. Not sure if that helps with onboard sound though.

Did you update chipset drivers? Flashed motherboard's bios to the latest version. That might help.

 

[Avinash4]

Thanks for the tips. I just find it strange that the problem just started happening, but it was fine before. The sound is onboard. I will try to upgrade chipset drivers tonight.