HELP - Is this my soundcard being a POS?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Steven C \(Doktersteve\)
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Steven C \(Doktersteve\)

I recently have noticed that lots of 3d shooters I have installed have
problems with my soundcard.

I notice when playing that the games have stuttering sounds. it will
stutter, and its very annoying.
Its just 3d games though, games that use direct x heavily in particular.

I have:

athlon xp 1800+
512 megs 2100 DDR ram
geforce 3 ti 200
soundblaster live value 5.1

do I need a new soundcard? What can I put in there that has surround sound
and is a "value card". I dont need an expensive soundcard, just something
that works.

I think this must be a sound problem. I have my system completely updated
(newest drivers), and am running windows xp pro with SP1. I have disabled
hardware acceleration of sound in dxdiag, still stuttering.

I have basically done all I can think of to make the problem go away, still
stuttering though.

pls give me some ideas. this is maddening.
thanks alot.

Steven.
 
Steven C (Doktersteve) said:
I recently have noticed that lots of 3d shooters I have installed have
problems with my soundcard.

I notice when playing that the games have stuttering sounds. it will
stutter, and its very annoying.
Its just 3d games though, games that use direct x heavily in particular.

I have:

athlon xp 1800+
512 megs 2100 DDR ram
geforce 3 ti 200
soundblaster live value 5.1

do I need a new soundcard? What can I put in there that has surround sound
and is a "value card". I dont need an expensive soundcard, just something
that works.

I think this must be a sound problem. I have my system completely updated
(newest drivers), and am running windows xp pro with SP1. I have disabled
hardware acceleration of sound in dxdiag, still stuttering.

I have basically done all I can think of to make the problem go away, still
stuttering though.

pls give me some ideas. this is maddening.
thanks alot.

Steven.
Click to expand...
Got the latest drivers? http://tinyurl.com/mm6j
 
Steven said:
I recently have noticed that lots of 3d shooters I have installed have
problems with my soundcard.

I notice when playing that the games have stuttering sounds. it will
stutter, and its very annoying.
Its just 3d games though, games that use direct x heavily in
particular.

I have:

athlon xp 1800+
512 megs 2100 DDR ram
geforce 3 ti 200
soundblaster live value 5.1

do I need a new soundcard? What can I put in there that has surround
sound and is a "value card". I dont need an expensive soundcard, just
something that works.

I think this must be a sound problem. I have my system completely
updated (newest drivers), and am running windows xp pro with SP1. I
have disabled hardware acceleration of sound in dxdiag, still
stuttering.

I have basically done all I can think of to make the problem go away,
still stuttering though.

pls give me some ideas. this is maddening.
thanks alot.

Steven.
Click to expand...


Probably your sound and video cards fighting over system resources. Seems
to happen a lot in graphic-intensive stuff nowadays. You might try making
sure you have the latest sound/video drivers for your system. If that
doesn't fix things you may need to back off your sound hardware acceleration
a notch, or even assign/reserve IRQs for your sound and/or video cards.
Also, it might help to make sure your sound card isn't in the PCI slot next
to your videocard. I always put mine card in the farthest possible slot
away. That's not supposed to matter as much now as it once did, but it
can't hurt.
 
Probably your sound and video cards fighting over system resources. Seems
to happen a lot in graphic-intensive stuff nowadays. You might try making
sure you have the latest sound/video drivers for your system. If that
doesn't fix things you may need to back off your sound hardware acceleration
a notch, or even assign/reserve IRQs for your sound and/or video cards.
Also, it might help to make sure your sound card isn't in the PCI slot next
to your videocard. I always put mine card in the farthest possible slot
away. That's not supposed to matter as much now as it once did, but it
can't hurt.
Click to expand...

The SBLive card in particular has issues with this. I've always
skipped the PCI slot below AGP because I read they shared an IRQ, but
I also had the SBLive act up when placed in the slot next to my
ethernet card. I know someone will probably pipe in about PCI
steering, but I can tell you that IRQ sharing doesn't work right with
the SBLive. There were tons of comments on it in the SB forums when I
was trying to figure out my problem.
Not sure why this would start now if you've had the card in the same
slot all along, but I'd consider it very suspect if you've added any
other card recently. The symptoms are exactly what happens when the SB
is butting heads over an IRQ.

I actually don't think its the card. I have a very similar setup to
the original poster, and don't have the problem:
Athlon XP 1900+, 512meg of RAM, SBLive Value, GeForce Ti4200.
 
Tim said:
Not sure why this would start now if you've had the card in the same
slot all along, but I'd consider it very suspect if you've added any
other card recently. The symptoms are exactly what happens when the SB
is butting heads over an IRQ.
Click to expand...
I suspect it could also happen if he's just started playing something that's
soaking up a lot more resources than anything else he's played on the
system, too. A lot of newer games seem like that could swallow everything
thrown at them, no matter how much it is. On top of that, vid/audio drivers
both act like each is the only thing running on a system. I had to revert
to older drivers for my Audigy 2, after the latest ones created a situation
on my system similar to the one we're now discussing.
I actually don't think its the card. I have a very similar setup to
the original poster, and don't have the problem:
Athlon XP 1900+, 512meg of RAM, SBLive Value, GeForce Ti4200.
Click to expand...

I don't think it's the card either--might be the drivers, but not the card
physically.
 
I notice when playing that the games have stuttering sounds. it will
stutter, and its very annoying.
Its just 3d games though, games that use direct x heavily in particular.
Click to expand...
Try moving sound card (and other PCI cards) to different slots.
 
Thanks alot for the replies.
I currently have a full PCI setup for the most part.
I have my sb live card on the lowest PCI slot, then two Ethernet cards (one
not being used, one being used), a dummy bracket for spare USB slots that I
currently do not use, then my AGP card.

This problem has existed before I had the second Ethernet card installed,
and since the extra USB ports dont use a pci slot technically (they are
plugged in via cable to the motherboard and just use the card slot to sit
in) that shouldn't be a problem.

- Yes I have the newest drivers, but I found in the past that uninstalling
the creative drivers and just using the default windows xp drivers work to
fix the problem. it makes it so I cant use my 4.1 speaker setup properly
though.

- I am really relieved to hear this probably isnt the card itself. thanks
for that.

- If I swap to my onboard audio, would that help? according to my
motherboard box, I have 6.1 channel 3d audio, but I dont see more than 3
plugins on the back for the mobo's sound. how would I plug in my 4 speakers?
I have an MSI KT3 Ultra motherboard.

- This only happens (as I said) when I use the latest games that are for the
most part FPS's which are directx heavy. Halo beta has this problem, as did
red faction 2. Curiously, state of emergency doesn't have this problem, but
Impossible creatures did have this problem.
Weird?

Thanks for the help. You have all made me much more confident I can solve
this.
I am intimidated by IRQ settings and reassigning system resources. is it as
bad as it was in the old windows 98 days?

Steven.
 
I have an MSI KT3 Ultra motherboard.
Click to expand...

I think I've read somewhere that you should use
PCI slot 3 for sound cards. We have done that and
not had any problems on our AMD systems.
I think it has something to do with the IRQ sharing.

Good luck

lyset
 
I had this problem for ages, and as far as I can tell, the cause is that so
much data is continuously being dumped to and from the graphics card that
there's no bandwidth left for the sound data. If you can find the right
programs to do it, tweaking the latency settings in the bios on board the
graphics card (yes, there is one! They just don't tell you.) will stop it
from hogging the bus so much. In my case, however, it helped but did not
completely solve the problem. I eventually solved the problem by a) getting
rid of the card I was using (Geforce II PCI, a giant resource leech), b)
changing the motherboard to one with a faster, newer chipset, and c) using
an AGP graphics card, so the PCI bus is barely touched by the graphics
processes.

The lying scumbag manufacturers claim that their product is within
specification for the bus system it's designed for. What they don't say is
that it only stays within spec if nothing else is plugged into the same bus!

Tom
 
I had this problem for ages, and as far as I can tell, the cause is that so
much data is continuously being dumped to and from the graphics card that
there's no bandwidth left for the sound data. If you can find the right
programs to do it, tweaking the latency settings in the bios on board the
graphics card (yes, there is one! They just don't tell you.) will stop it
from hogging the bus so much. In my case, however, it helped but did not
completely solve the problem. I eventually solved the problem by a) getting
rid of the card I was using (Geforce II PCI, a giant resource leech), b)
changing the motherboard to one with a faster, newer chipset, and c) using
an AGP graphics card, so the PCI bus is barely touched by the graphics
processes.

The lying scumbag manufacturers claim that their product is within
specification for the bus system it's designed for. What they don't say is
that it only stays within spec if nothing else is plugged into the same bus!
Click to expand...

In all fairness, PCI is a pretty old spec not designed to shift the
vast amount of data a graphics card needs to shift (I think AGP 8x can
shift something close to a gig a second, but I haven't seen stuff on
it in a long time so I could just be talking out of my ass) so you
would expect that a powerful PCI graphics card would hog the whole
lot, because otherwise people would complain what a feeble card it is!

Civilian Target
"Build a man a fire and you'll keep him warm for a day. Set a man on fire and you'll keep him warm for the rest of his life" - Northern-Irish proverb
 
Thanks for the reply.
I am not using a pci card, that would be crazy of me when i have a perfectly
good agp slot.
So what i am hearing is that i may not be able to solve the problem at all,
really. That is a shame, i dont like ot hear that at all.

I will try and move the sound card around and as far away from everything
else as i can. I will take out one of the ethernet cards (i have two because
originally i was going ot use windows xp's internet connection sharing, but
decided against it, but got the second card for CHEAP...), and will take out
the usb dummy bracket completely as i dont use that many usb ports.

I really wish that there was a solution that wouldnt cost me alot of money,
but it sounds as if i just got a bad motherboard if it can't handle all the
data flowing through it, and is therefore causing the stutters.

I was considering going to a radeon 9600 pro, but if my current
configuration cant support a geforce 3 ti 200, what would be the a waste of
my money right now, wouldnt it?

Thanks alot again, and if there are any more suggestions, let me know, i am
willing to try anything!
Steven.

Civilian_Target said:
bus!

In all fairness, PCI is a pretty old spec not designed to shift the
vast amount of data a graphics card needs to shift (I think AGP 8x can
shift something close to a gig a second, but I haven't seen stuff on
it in a long time so I could just be talking out of my ass) so you
would expect that a powerful PCI graphics card would hog the whole
lot, because otherwise people would complain what a feeble card it is!

Civilian Target
"Build a man a fire and you'll keep him warm for a day. Set a man on fire
Click to expand...
and you'll keep him warm for the rest of his life" - Northern-Irish proverb
 
Steven C (Doktersteve) said:
- If I swap to my onboard audio, would that help? according to my
motherboard box, I have 6.1 channel 3d audio, but I dont see more than 3
plugins on the back for the mobo's sound. how would I plug in my 4 speakers?
I have an MSI KT3 Ultra motherboard.
Click to expand...

This may seem like a stupid question.... but you *have* disabled the
On-board sound in the motherboard.. right??

(and as for speaker plugs... it depends on your speaker setup.. My
experience with those things is that you plug everything into the
subwoofer, and let that sort out what goes to what... and the subwoofer
has 2 or 3 plugs that go to the soundcard)

--
Ben Cottrell AKA Bench


"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as
kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills
and listening to repetitive electronic music." - Kristian Wilson,
Nintendo, Inc, 1989
 
Ben Cottrell said:
This may seem like a stupid question.... but you *have* disabled the
On-board sound in the motherboard.. right??

(and as for speaker plugs... it depends on your speaker setup.. My
experience with those things is that you plug everything into the
subwoofer, and let that sort out what goes to what... and the subwoofer
has 2 or 3 plugs that go to the soundcard)
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply ben,

I have the onboard audio disabled, yes. Its not a stupid question, you never
know how people are over the net, and many ppl would have it ON by default.

I have two hookups for my speakers (altec lansing, a few years old. 4
speakers and 1 sub), i have a black and green plug which need to be plugged
in (i think) to the similar colored hookups on the back of my soundcard. i
will however try and rip out the sound card (not literally lol) and try it
with the onboard audio only.
 
Steven C (Doktersteve) said:
I recently have noticed that lots of 3d shooters I have installed have
problems with my soundcard.

I notice when playing that the games have stuttering sounds. it will
stutter, and its very annoying.
Its just 3d games though, games that use direct x heavily in particular.

I have:

athlon xp 1800+
512 megs 2100 DDR ram
geforce 3 ti 200
soundblaster live value 5.1
Click to expand...

If you have a motherboard with a VIA chipset, you're having the same
problems I have. The facts are these. The SB Live is a piece of shit
card, never designed to work under 2000/XP, and it's an incredible
PCI bus hog. Now combine this with the extremely retarded PCI
arbiter design in the VIA chipsets, and you get problems. The fix ?
Replace either one. The soundcard would probably be cheapest,
but you could still have problems with the motherboard. Me, I'm
going to buy myself an nvidia motherboard with soundstorm and
never buy a product of these two retarded companies anymore.
 
I called the shop where i got all the hardware, and even though i got the
hardware (especially the soundcard) ages ago, i got some over the phone tech
support here at work.

The tech said that i should set up my PCI cards like this (from top to
bottom):

-AGP SLOT
-EMPTY PCI
-SOUNDBLASTER CARD
-USB EXPANSION (again, this doesnt use the pci SLOT, just the metal mount)
-ETHERNET CARD

If it helps any of you (who have been really really really helpful btw),
this is my current setup:

-AGP SLOT
-USB EXPANSION
-ETHERNET CARD (card in use)
-ETHERNET CARD (card not in use)
-SOUNDBLASTER

So i will be moving up my soundblaster two slots, getting rid of one
ethernet card, and possibly the usb expansion which i dont use, so why have
it hooked up to the motherboard?

He said usually you want the AGP slot and soundcard to be one slot away from
each other to make sure there arent too many conflicts, and soemthing about
bandwidth that i dont recall.

My friend who is a little better on the hardware side of things (he comes to
me for windows/software help alternatively) will be over tomorrow morning,
we will see how things develop.
 
Mesaeus said:
in message news:be_6b.5841$Mg7.3359@pd7tw1no...

If you have a motherboard with a VIA chipset, you're having the same
problems I have. The facts are these. The SB Live is a piece of shit
card, never designed to work under 2000/XP, and it's an incredible
PCI bus hog. Now combine this with the extremely retarded PCI
arbiter design in the VIA chipsets, and you get problems. The fix ?
Replace either one. The soundcard would probably be cheapest,
but you could still have problems with the motherboard. Me, I'm
going to buy myself an nvidia motherboard with soundstorm and
never buy a product of these two retarded companies anymore.
Click to expand...

thanks for the opinion.
The tech i spoke to ruled out this as a problem and said that the board
should support the SB card just fine and dandy. Would putting in an audigly
(or whatever the name is) be a solution? I would have to spend about $75
canadian for an OEM one, so chances are that for now i would just switch to
the onboard audio and say to hell with 4 speaker surround (i can just use
the back two speakers for sound, i usually use headphones as it is though)
until i can get a 5.1 card and some 5.1 speakers.

Lots of help on theses groups. thank goodness i found some good people to
help me.
 
Steven said:
thanks for the opinion.
The tech i spoke to ruled out this as a problem and said that the
board should support the SB card just fine and dandy. Would putting
in an audigly (or whatever the name is) be a solution? I would have
to spend about $75 canadian for an OEM one, so chances are that for
now i would just switch to the onboard audio and say to hell with 4
speaker surround (i can just use the back two speakers for sound, i
usually use headphones as it is though) until i can get a 5.1 card
and some 5.1 speakers.

Lots of help on theses groups. thank goodness i found some good
people to help me.
Click to expand...

Odds are if you have the problem with the Live, you'd also have it with an
Audigy or Audigy 2. If you're not satisfied with the onboard sound you
have, then you might want to move away from a Creative card if you decide to
try another standalone. Maybe a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz or one of the
Hercules cards. You should be able to get your Live working OK, though.
You try backing your hardware acceleration down a notch in your system sound
settings yet?
 
Steven C (Doktersteve) said:
thanks for the opinion.
The tech i spoke to ruled out this as a problem and said that the board
should support the SB card just fine and dandy. Would putting in an audigly
(or whatever the name is) be a solution? I would have to spend about $75
canadian for an OEM one, so chances are that for now i would just switch to
the onboard audio and say to hell with 4 speaker surround (i can just use
the back two speakers for sound, i usually use headphones as it is though)
until i can get a 5.1 card and some 5.1 speakers.
Click to expand...

The Audigy should be a LOT better. Mind you, I can use my SB Live. It's just
that I had to go through hell to get it usable, and even now I've kinda
learned to ignore every hiccup and crackling sound as much as I can. The
PCI arbiter problem on VIA chipsets will also effectively nullify any RAID
you ever install, so if you plan to use RAID at some point or maybe video
capturing (another problem area), I'd advise to get a mb with another
chipset. NVIDIA has great sound, but you can even use a cheap Sis
motherboard, the Live will probably work fine as long as it doesn't have to
deal with the VIA PCI arbiter. It's just the combination of two bad designs
that gets ya. All things considering I would advise to get another mb if
you want to be really sure, the main culprit is the VIA chipset.

People found out how awfully designed the Live was because of the VIA
chipsets, otherwise it would never be known. Effectively the Live spams
the pci bus with an enormous amount of data, but in a good working
PCI bus this should be doable. The VIA chipsets on the other hand ALL
have a bad PCI arbiter, which interrupts any PCI device FAR too soon,
way too much and therefore SERIOUSLY lowers the PCI bandwidth.
It's like the unstoppable force meeting the unmovable object :)
 
chainbreaker said:
Odds are if you have the problem with the Live, you'd also have it with an
Audigy or Audigy 2. If you're not satisfied with the onboard sound you
have, then you might want to move away from a Creative card if you decide to
try another standalone. Maybe a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz or one of the
Hercules cards. You should be able to get your Live working OK, though.
You try backing your hardware acceleration down a notch in your system sound
settings yet?
Click to expand...

yes, after i installed dx 9.0b, i went into dxdiag and turned down the
acceleration to basically nothing. i tried everything from full to no
acceleration, and find the problem still happens, but after what i have
learned in the past few hours (through this group and through the tech guy i
spoke to), it seems i SHOULD be able to get the Live working though.
 
Mesaeus said:
The Audigy should be a LOT better. Mind you, I can use my SB Live. It's just
that I had to go through hell to get it usable, and even now I've kinda
learned to ignore every hiccup and crackling sound as much as I can. The
PCI arbiter problem on VIA chipsets will also effectively nullify any RAID
you ever install, so if you plan to use RAID at some point or maybe video
capturing (another problem area), I'd advise to get a mb with another
chipset. NVIDIA has great sound, but you can even use a cheap Sis
motherboard, the Live will probably work fine as long as it doesn't have to
deal with the VIA PCI arbiter. It's just the combination of two bad designs
that gets ya. All things considering I would advise to get another mb if
you want to be really sure, the main culprit is the VIA chipset.

People found out how awfully designed the Live was because of the VIA
chipsets, otherwise it would never be known. Effectively the Live spams
the pci bus with an enormous amount of data, but in a good working
PCI bus this should be doable. The VIA chipsets on the other hand ALL
have a bad PCI arbiter, which interrupts any PCI device FAR too soon,
way too much and therefore SERIOUSLY lowers the PCI bandwidth.
It's like the unstoppable force meeting the unmovable object :)
Click to expand...

So if i wanted a makeshift solution in the mean time, i could just take the
live card out, enable the onboard sound in my bios, and let windows xp
detect/install that as my primary "soundcard", correct?

I just want something that functions. i have been looking at spending about
$400 american at getting a motherboard/cpu upgrade package from the oem
store i do business with, and when that happens, i may just stick with a
motherboard that has good onboard sound, if it doesnt eat too many cpu
cycles like in the old days.
I was reading about how the surround sound on some of these boards are
impressive, some even supporting dolby 5.1.

still though, i will try and get my old faithful live working tomorrow.
 
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