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Graf Paper · 02-03-08, 10:46 AM

Actually, kiwi, if you had to resort to falling back to the onboard sound your trouble was likely caused by one of these faults:

You did not disable the onboard sound in your BIOS, which created a memory allocation conflict between the onboard sound and the add-on PCI sound card.

You forgot to uninstall the onboard sound drivers before installing your PCI sound card.

If you did do those things, then your stuttering was caused by having the sound card installed into a PCI slot that created a bottleneck on a shared IRQ. For systems that have AGP video cards installed, never plug any card into PCI slot #1 as it shares the same resources as the AGP bus. PCI slots #3 and #4 usually work best for sound cards.

OR

You needed to make sure the PCI Latency Timer (also known as Transaction Delay) in the BIOS is set to a value of at least 64, but you might have to go as high as 128 to reduce the burden on the PCI bus so the sound card can "keep up" in the midst of all the direct access loading the CPU from the AGP bus and DDR RAM pipeline.

Some other tips for improving system performance and stability:

Don't forget to disable Fast Read/Write for the AGP and set the AGP apeture to at least 128 (this is how much system RAM is allocated to buffer memory writes to the video card when video RAM is full) and disable shadowing for the BIOS and video card BIOS.

Set your Gate A20 to Fast and disable Spread Spectrum for the RAM. All that Spread Spectrum does is reduce the radio frequency emissions from the RAM to reduce interference with nearby radios and televisions but it sacrifices stability in the RAM read/write to do so. This negatively impacts very fast RAM especially.

As a general rule, onboard sound does not offer anywhere near the same quality and performance as an add-on card can unless your demands are no greater than 16-bit stereo.

For newer systems some of these settings may be different or non-existent. I haven't moved into the modern 64-bit, PCI Express era yet.

I used to love building my own computer systems until I got married. Now the wife spends all the money.

02-03-08, 10:46 AM	#5
Graf Paper Ace of the Deep Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: Pacific Northwest United States Posts: 1,146 Downloads: 41 Uploads: 2	Actually, kiwi, if you had to resort to falling back to the onboard sound your trouble was likely caused by one of these faults: You did not disable the onboard sound in your BIOS, which created a memory allocation conflict between the onboard sound and the add-on PCI sound card. You forgot to uninstall the onboard sound drivers before installing your PCI sound card. If you did do those things, then your stuttering was caused by having the sound card installed into a PCI slot that created a bottleneck on a shared IRQ. For systems that have AGP video cards installed, never plug any card into PCI slot #1 as it shares the same resources as the AGP bus. PCI slots #3 and #4 usually work best for sound cards. OR You needed to make sure the PCI Latency Timer (also known as Transaction Delay) in the BIOS is set to a value of at least 64, but you might have to go as high as 128 to reduce the burden on the PCI bus so the sound card can "keep up" in the midst of all the direct access loading the CPU from the AGP bus and DDR RAM pipeline. Some other tips for improving system performance and stability: Don't forget to disable Fast Read/Write for the AGP and set the AGP apeture to at least 128 (this is how much system RAM is allocated to buffer memory writes to the video card when video RAM is full) and disable shadowing for the BIOS and video card BIOS. Set your Gate A20 to Fast and disable Spread Spectrum for the RAM. All that Spread Spectrum does is reduce the radio frequency emissions from the RAM to reduce interference with nearby radios and televisions but it sacrifices stability in the RAM read/write to do so. This negatively impacts very fast RAM especially. As a general rule, onboard sound does not offer anywhere near the same quality and performance as an add-on card can unless your demands are no greater than 16-bit stereo. For newer systems some of these settings may be different or non-existent. I haven't moved into the modern 64-bit, PCI Express era yet. I used to love building my own computer systems until I got married. Now the wife spends all the money. __________________ Still sailing the high seas, hunting convoys with those who join me.