I've got a sound skipping/static-y problem with my SBLive on a K7S5A. I've got the following hardware (WinXP Pro):
400W Antec PS
1.4ghz athlon
256M Crucial 2100 RDRAM
AGP Matrox Marvel g450 eTV
PCI Matrox Millenium g200 SD
SBLive 5.1 Value
Promise Ultra100
4 IBM Deskstars of various sizes - 3 of them attached to Promise
AOpen 1640 DVD drive
AOpen 1232(?) CDRW
3Com Homeconnect Webcam (USB)
Epson Stylus Scan Color 2500 (USB)
PS/2 Keyboard & PS/2 Optical Logitech Mouse
My problem is that my sound starts skipping and sounding static-y during periods of disk activity (it may be only during periods of disk activity from the Promise card, but I'm not sure) and during periods of 'drawing' on the secondary g200 display. Also, when the sound is 'cut out', mouse & keyboard input are also cut out. The mouse pointer stays where it is on the screen, even though I'm still moving the mouse. It will catch up to where it's supposed to be when the sound starts playing again. These are ways I've found to consistantly produce the problem:
1) With my secondary video card installed and active, just logging into XP will produce the skipping/static-y sound. If I move my mouse pointer around in circles during log-in, it also skips with the sound.
2) With my secondary video card installed and active, play something in Winamp, then open the Seti@Home graphic window, and drag it over to the secondary display. I get static 'chirps' every time the Seti window draws something new, but only when atleast part of the Seti window is on the secondary display.
3) Without any secondary card installed in the system (or with -- it doesn't matter), play something in Winamp and open Device Manager. The sounds gets static-y, then cuts out completely until the Device Manager is fully displayed and done refreshing. My hard disks are also intensively thrashing during the time the sound is not playing.
I used to have a non-5.1 SBLive in there, but it did the same thing. I can't get the onboard sound to work at all (system keeps freezing when I try to play any sound and I'm sure I'm using the right BIOS & drivers). I've tried a SB128, but had the same problem. I'm trying to determine if the problem is with the SBLive, with the Promise card, with the g450 eTV, or with the K7S5A. I know it's not necessarily related to the secondary video card, because I have the same problems with it uninstalled. I tried using Sonique instead of Winamp, but I get the exact same sound problems.
I have the latest official BIOS release for my board from the Taiwan ECS site (U.S. site doesn't have it). I've tried pretty much every combination of drivers for the SBLive, g200 & g450 eTV and no one combination is better than any other. I've tried going from ACPI to Standard PC mode and I think the problem actually got a little worse. I've toggled the 'PNP OS' option in my BIOS, but that does nothing. I've toggled the AGP multiplication factor & aperature size, but that does nothing. I've also made sure that the SBLive, g200 & g450 eTV were all using their own IRQ's and I/O ranges. It was difficult (played musical PCI slots for a while), but I got it to happen, but it didn't help either. This problem also ocurrs in Windows 2000 & in X-Windows.
I see something about PCI bus over-use here. Could my g450 eTV be causing some issues? Are there utilites to measure this sort of thing? Would a higher-quality motherboard help me out - maybe one with multiple onboard ATA-100 capable IDE ports? Would a non-Creative sound card work better?
I'm willing to buy other system components if need be. I'd just like a solid & smooth WinXP system with dual (or triple) display & high-quality sound. Linux Mandrake support would be a big plus too. I hardly ever do any 3D stuff (maybe one display with good 3D ability would be nice), but would like to work with video processing & possibly sound/music composition. Some way of feeding in S-Video and/or Coax would be nice too. I refuse to work with any ATI product that has a tuner on it (those products have caused nothing but headaches for me - and I've worked with 3 different All-In-Blunder lines in various types of systems & the regular TV-Blunder card) and am very leary about regular ATI display cards in general due to their reputation for crappy drivers & the fact that it takes them over a year to release drivers for a new Windows OS after it hits the street. I hear that NVidia is supposed to have some of the most stable drivers available... How are they for bus use?
Any ideas? Thanks in advance - shaun
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