GA-EP45-DS5 Crackling Sound

[PooX]

Ever since I build my PC, the sound has been bad. It's difficult for me to describe but I think the ticking/crackling of a gramophone record comes closest.
I am talking about the onboard sound(Azalia) here.

I cannot seem to resolve the issue by updating the drivers. I have tried the drivers supplied on CD, the drivers from gigabyte website and even the drivers from realtek.
After googling a bit I found out that a bad DPC latency can cause these problems. I checked it and indeed they don't look very good.

This is on Windows Vista SP1 x64:


I installed Windows XP SP3 x86 just to check if it might have something to do with Vista:


As the results are both bad I suppose it has nothing to do with a driver.
What could it be and how can I fix this? Listening to sound is unbearably annoying :(
Disabling Advanced DES seems to improve the latency a little, but it's still over 2000 most of the time.
Another (related?) issue I have is that the DES process "GSvr.exe" always crashes after some time. Mostly within the hour after a boot.

Here's my config:
CPU: Intel Core2Quad Q9450
GPU: Sapphire HD 4870
MEM: 2x 2GB OCZ 1000 Mhz (running @ 800Mhz though)
Power: Corsair 620HX

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: GA-EP45-DS5 Crackling Sound

Can/have you tried moving you GFX card to slot 2? Sometimes this helps.

I can say P35 had some issues with this, but reading everything I do..... I now know it is not a GA-P35 specific issue. All boards can be affected by it in several ways. BIOS, Drivers, and Applications can all have similar DPC effects if something is not working properly.

If you overclock/do not use DES then you can uninstall it.

When you did your x86 XP test install, was this install clean? Meaning not a modified XP disk, or no drivers ect installed before latency test? If you did use a modded one, or installed drivers then the test cannot be considered valid. I would do a clean install with no drivers or programs and see if the issue is still there.

BTW, what BIOS are you using?

Also did you check all sound connections to see if this crackle is present in all of them? I ask because ALOT of times people plug their headphones into their case's without checking both wiring diagrams. These Boards have HD Audio and alot of cases plugs are not wired for that, so the wires do not match up properly. So.... Have you looked at your case wiring diagram, and your boards? They may not match, and this could also be the cause of your sound issue, not the DPC though just the crackle I mean there

[pieter.w]

Re: GA-EP45-DS5 Crackling Sound

@Poox... did you solve your crackling problem?
I experience the same crackling sound with a new mobo EP45-UD3R.
Even after updating all the posible drivers to the newest available, uninstalling DES, swapping the add-on sound card (SoundBlaster Live OR Soundblaster Audigy) to 1 of the 3 PCI-slots. After long hours of searching and doing things.. The problem persists. Realy annoying.
Hope you have found the cause.
pieter

UPDATE
After reading many forum messages and suggestions, I finaly found the cause why the sound was crackling and the mouse pointer got stucked (simultaneously with the cracked sound).
At the mobo I'd mentioned before, there are 2 Gigabite sATA ports (pink color; so called GSATA). One of these ports I used for the C-drive (with W-XP pro-SP3).
At the BIOS these ports are set to Disabled (Onboard SATA/IDE Device) and Onboard SATA/IDE CtrlMode set to IDE.
Windows starts up without a hitch, but the sound / mouse problem exists..
After unplugging the C-drive from the Gigabyte sATA ports and connected to one of the Intel sATA ports (6 x yellow connectors), the problem was gone!!

Relieved after hours of searching and hoping...
pieter

[codingkid]

Re: GA-EP45-DS5 Crackling Sound

I had the exact same problem with cracking and popping. Also, was getting some weirdness in games...momentary freezing etc. A couple of days ago the mouse was locking up. Looking into system logs showed IDE and CDROM issues. A reboot fixed the mouse lockup problem.

My system uses a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R motherboard, Intel E7300 CPU, and I have a Sapphire ATI HD4850 video card. After downloading DPC Latency checker, I saw some very large red bar spikes every second or so between much smaller green bars. Surely a big problem. Even the green bars were much larger than normal (5us is normal for this wonderful motherboard).

So, I went into device manager and started disabling things and my SATA hard drive appeared to be the culprit. Notice I said "appeared to be". When disabled, the red bars went away. But the green bars were still rather high.

Fortunately my primary drive was an IDE drive, so I could disable the SATA drive without any problems (Naturally, the drive Windows lives on cannot be disabled). However, disabling the drive was not a solution. I needed extra strorage.

The drive was attached to one of the yellow ports and moving to other ports (including the RAID ports) made no difference. The raid controller was set for IDE. The SATA drive was known to be good as it came from my old system.

So, I figured this must be a software problem. Sure enough. The red bars went away after uninstalling G.O.M. (Gigabyte Online Management Utility). However, the green bars were still higher than normal. Closing out the Gigabyte "EasyTune 6" utility fixed the problem completely (back to normal 5us latency).

Problem solved. Just uninstall G.O.M (Even with SNMP installed, I never got it working anyway) and only run EasyTune when you need it. Do not have it autostart with Windows. Better yet, if you're not overclocking, uninstall both of them.

The DPC latency checker is a great troubleshooting tool and saved the day:-)

DPC Latency Checker

[pudlglum]