Sound keeps dying while running SLI

Coolone

Senior member
Aug 18, 2001
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*Note* This is a revision of the first post I made earlier, but I figured I would just bump this thread instead of making a new one. Any input would be appreciated.

Okay, this is going to be a long post, because I'm running out of ideas and I'm going to write everything I've done to try and nail down this problem. After extensive testing, I have reason to believe that theres something up with the motherboard, although I'm not positive.

First my specs:

EVGA 680i Mobo
2x EVGA GeForce 7900 GS KO
2GB DDR2 800 Ram
Intel C2D 2.4 Ghz
Sound Blaster Audigy 4 Pro
WD Raptor 150G
2x 500G Drives
250G Drive
I dont do ANY overclocking, all the speeds listed are stock.

The problem is what whenever I play a game in SLI mode, the games sound will go psycho at any moment (ranging from about 10 minutes to over an hour before the problem occurs). Instead of playing the sounds it should, all I get is a high pitched sound playing. When I quit the game, the sound is silent until I run an application that has sound (like winamp), and then the high pitched sound comes back. In order to fix this, I have to restart the computer. This occurs when Directsound, EAX, or OpenAL are being used, including any combo of those (Like quake 4 using OpenAL and EAX at the same time). I have not been able to recreate this problem with SLI turned off so far.

At first I tried the basic stuff like reinstalling drivers etc, but none of that worked. I then suspected that the heat could be a problem. Luckily for me, theres a grate on the side of my case right over the area in question, and I installed an intake fan over the area, making the temperatures drop from 67 Celcius under extreme punishment to 56 Celcius under the same load, and these sound problems persisted. I also reinstalled directx.

Once again I was in luck, because I have the exact same type of sound card in another system. So thinking that the sound card could have gone bad, I switched them. Both cards worked flawlessly in the other system, but both cards freaked out in my current system, so the cards are working fine, its somehow an issue between the cards and the rest of the machine (also take note that I tried using different PCI slots as well while trying to diagnose this). I decided to disable the Audigy altogether and try to recreate this problem using the onboard Realtek sound. The games ran perfectly, not a sound glitched, nothing.

The ONLY thing that changed on the machine prior to this was that I updated to the new P23 BIOS. Prior to this update, everything was running perfectly. I was one of the lucky ones not getting any problems with SATA or anything, but I thought I should go with the safe route and update anyway (because EVGA said so). I checked to see if there were any conflicts between devices, and none were listed.

So just to recap, the conditions are as follows:

SLI on, Audigy card installed and enabled = Sound wigging out after a period of time, forcing a reboot.
SLI off, Audigy card installed and enabled = Works great
SLI on, Audigy card disabled, onboard sound enabled = works great
SLI off, Audigy card disabled, onboard sound enabled = works great

Games that this has happened in so far:
Company of Heroes (A LOT)
Guild Wars (Hardly ever)
Quake 4 (Fairly often)

Both my original and spare Audigy 4 pro cards work perfectly in another machine.

What I think may be the problem is somehow a conflict develops between the PCIx and PCI buses when SLI is on? I could be way off base here, but I've got a hunch that something in the motherboard is screwed. I really want to get this fixed, but I cant really think of anything else to do, can anyone give any suggestions?
 

Aikouka

Lifer
Nov 27, 2001
30,383
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Wasn't there an issue with nForce 680i motherboards in SLi having messed up sound with Creative sound cards installed? Or am I misconstruing one issue with factors not involved?
 

willtriv

Member
Oct 21, 2005
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i'd have to say that it sounds like addressing issue and is likely an error in drivers from one of the parties, the error will work out in time, choose onboard or lower fps for now i guess.
 

Coolone

Senior member
Aug 18, 2001
983
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Originally posted by: Aikouka
Wasn't there an issue with nForce 680i motherboards in SLi having messed up sound with Creative sound cards installed? Or am I misconstruing one issue with factors not involved?

There were two rounds of issues with the 680i chipset. One of them was when ppl had 2 GF8's running with a SB X-Fi, and the other was SATA corruption issues. They've both been resolved via bios updates now. I was never affected by the SATA problems, but EVGA said to upgrade anyway just in case.

Originally posted by: willtriv
i'd have to say that it sounds like addressing issue and is likely an error in drivers from one of the parties, the error will work out in time, choose onboard or lower fps for now i guess.

Why would that be the case now and not last week? Do you think its an addressing conflict between the second graphics card and the sound card even though they're on different buses? (PCI X & PCI are seperate buses, right? I dont know much about how they relate to each other except by name)

Edit: I just turned on SLI and checked for conflicts, nothing wrong there :-/