Creative sound distorts under high hard drive activity.

[skEwb]

I'm experiencing distorting, crackling, poppiping and other slow downtempo sound issues under high hdd activity in vista. I have an Audigy 2 with latest vista drivers installed for it and it seems to work fine if the hdd isn't transfering much data, but the issue is very annoying if I'm doing any sort of heavy hdd activity. I've tried both winamp/foobar2k/wmp to play mp3s but it wont stop on either one. I've also told all the software to use the sound card directly. Any ideas? Both my HDDS are WD and sata. My system specs:

AMD Opteron 165 @ 2655Mhz
Corsair XMS PC3200C2 2.5,3,3,6 @ 245MHz or 490DDR
eVGA 7800GT CO SE (510/1200)
OCZ-520ADJ SLI PSU
Creative Audigy 2
WDC 400KD 16mb cache 7200rpm
WDC 200JD 8mb cache 7200rpm
Pioneer111D Bios 1.29

[Steve]

Hi skEwb,

did you make the PC yourself. I have seen something similiar to this because a motherboard screw was missing from a friends homemade PC. It meant that one section of the motherboard wasnt grounded correctly.

If you can try another Sound Card and see if it happens.

Another thing to keep an eye out for is the power consumption of the PC. If your PC is trying to get more power than the Power supply can give then everything will work on the limit and give intermittent problems.

Hope this helps,

regards

Steve

[skEwb]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve

Hi skEwb,

did you make the PC yourself. I have seen something similiar to this because a motherboard screw was missing from a friends homemade PC. It meant that one section of the motherboard wasnt grounded correctly.

If you can try another Sound Card and see if it happens.

Another thing to keep an eye out for is the power consumption of the PC. If your PC is trying to get more power than the Power supply can give then everything will work on the limit and give intermittent problems.

Hope this helps,

regards

Steve

Hey Steve,

I did build the system myself and the sound card does have the screw in there real tight holding it in the PCI slot. I was using XP before Vista and the sound card worked 100%. I have since found an article on the Creative Vista forums saying that the Vista sound engine is quicker than that of XP and that this sort of timing issue wont be resolved until they release new drivers.

Meanwhile enjoy my homemade video of what happens

hxxp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Fk75jcJZms

This only happens if I'm heavily tasking the hdd with defraging or unraring large files etc. If there isn't much hdd activity it subsides.

[Steve]

Hi skEwb,

thanks for updating us and that is a great way to show people what sort of problems you are having, a video is worth a thousand words...

I have embedded it here for ya...

YouTube Video

Who is the band playing?

regards

Steve

[skEwb]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve

Hi skEwb,

thanks for updating us and that is a great way to show people what sort of problems you are having, a video is worth a thousand words...

I have embedded it here for ya...

YouTube Video

Who is the band playing?

regards

Steve

The band is Static-X from their new album Cannibal and the song is a bonus track called Get up and boogie. It's a funny track

YouTube Video

I suffer from the very same problem, make sure you post any solutions
here so that the rest of us poor saps can benefit from it. I'm
contemplating reverting to XP if this doesn't resolve itself


--
Rolfus

[skEwb]

Some resources on future developments on Vista Audio and alternate drivers etc.

Audigy Series Vista Driver Pack 2 « No More Goat Soup
Windows Vista - Creative Labs

[skEwb]

Finally something that will help a lot if you have an nforce chipset! I updated my drivers from 15.01 to 15.08 and now i can see my hdd light go on full activity and the sound doesn't skip or skips barely! I found the drivers here:

download from Guru3D.com

These drivers are available from nVidia
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_64_15.08.html

Products supported are:
a.. nForce 680i SLI/680i LT SLI
b.. nForce 680a SLI
c.. nForce 650i SLI
d.. nForce 590 SLI Intel


"skEwb" <skEwb.2y9z12@no-mx.forums.vistaheads.com> wrote in message
news:skEwb.2y9z12@no-mx.forums.vistaheads.com...
>
> Finally something that will help a lot if you have an nforce chipset! I
> updated my drivers from 15.01 to 15.08 and now i can see my hdd light go
> on full activity and the sound doesn't skip or skips barely! I found the
> drivers here:
>
> 'download from Guru3D.com' (http://tinyurl.com/yntq2x)
>
>
> --
> skEwb
> Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com
>

[skEwb]

Even though it works when you install and it seems to help a lot it causes several other issues that end up being far worse than just sound issues. Oh well

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dominic Payer

These drivers are available from nVidia
nForce 15.08

Products supported are:
a.. nForce 680i SLI/680i LT SLI
b.. nForce 680a SLI
c.. nForce 650i SLI
d.. nForce 590 SLI Intel


"skEwb" <skEwb.2y9z12@no-mx.forums.vistaheads.com> wrote in message
news:skEwb.2y9z12@no-mx.forums.vistaheads.com...
>
> Finally something that will help a lot if you have an nforce chipset! I
> updated my drivers from 15.01 to 15.08 and now i can see my hdd light go
> on full activity and the sound doesn't skip or skips barely! I found the
> drivers here:
>
> 'download from Guru3D.com' (download from Guru3D.com)
>
>
> --
> skEwb
> Posted via http://www.vistaheads.com
>