S2885 - DVD and MP3 "skipping" when under load

  • Thread starter Thread starter Noozer
  • Start date Start date
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Noozer

Just wondering if anyone has an idea on how to deal with this...

- Tyan S2885 mainboard
- pair of Opteron 242s.
- 768meg of memory (got another 256meg stick on RMA that will complete the
dual channel on CPU2)
- Highpoint 1802A PCI-X SATA RAID controller in a PCIX133 slot driving 8
Maxtor Maxline 2 HDD's
- WD Raptor 36gig SATA drive on the mainboards SATA 0 connector for the OS
- 256 meg ATI Radeon 9800 Pro in the AGP slot.
- Using the onboard sound hardware
- OS is Windows XP Pro (32bit)

It seems that if I have a DVD playing or MP3 playing, it will
skip/stutter/jump if I'm moving data to the hard drives.

Are there any settings in the BIOS, or Windows settings I could tweak that
would reduce the stutter? I was thinking PCI latency settings or memory/bus
timings, etc.

Would a dedicated soundcard like an Audigy in the PCI slot improve the
situation?

Will getting that last piece of memory into the PC make a big difference?

Thanks!
 
Noozer said:
Just wondering if anyone has an idea on how to deal with this...

- Tyan S2885 mainboard
- pair of Opteron 242s.
- 768meg of memory (got another 256meg stick on RMA that will complete the
dual channel on CPU2)
- Highpoint 1802A PCI-X SATA RAID controller in a PCIX133 slot driving 8
Maxtor Maxline 2 HDD's
- WD Raptor 36gig SATA drive on the mainboards SATA 0 connector for the OS
- 256 meg ATI Radeon 9800 Pro in the AGP slot.
- Using the onboard sound hardware
- OS is Windows XP Pro (32bit)

It seems that if I have a DVD playing or MP3 playing, it will
skip/stutter/jump if I'm moving data to the hard drives.

Are there any settings in the BIOS, or Windows settings I could tweak that
would reduce the stutter? I was thinking PCI latency settings or memory/bus
timings, etc.
Click to expand...

The first thing I would try would be increasing
the priority of whatever app(s) you are using for
video/audio. You can test this by manually setting
the priority in Task Manager.

If that solves the problem you can make it permanent by
adjusting the shortcuts for those apps. An example of
how this would work is to change the "target" for a shortcut
so that it is like this:
C:\WINNT\system32\CMD.EXE /c "start /abovenormal /d"C:\Program Files\WinAmp" WinAmp.exe"

Would a dedicated soundcard like an Audigy in the PCI slot improve the
situation?

Will getting that last piece of memory into the PC make a big difference?
Click to expand...

Probably not, but it can't hurt to try.
 
The on-board sound is your problem: it uses the CPU's for audio processing.
And when the CPU's are under load of transferring data elsewhere, the
onboard sound chip becomes a low priority and thus skips. Get a PCI sound
card and that will fix it.
 
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