e6500 crackling audio

True, but I don't have a smartcard so that's not an option....

 

Doesn't work in my case. But actually I don't even know whether the card I used is a smart card that works with the reader and I don't know which side has to be up..
Can't find anything the manual.. :S

 

Are these problems only happening with Vista? I took a snapshop of the latency on my m4400 running XP SP3......



I haven't tried Vista yet, but so far I have yet see these problems in XP. Even while running Prime95, FurMark and Windows Media Player the playback is rock solid (the screenshot was on an idle system, under load the latency goes up but apparently not enough to cause an audio problem).

 

I mixed something up. Sorry.
I ment the SD-cardreader. Thats where I put a card in. Since I did that, I don't have any crackling at all.

Edit:
Nah. Fail. It probably has nothing to do with it. A couple of minutes ago the crackling was back. Tried unplugging devices, taking sd-card out and putting it back in... no change.. until I didn't do anything. Suddenly it stopped.

On next vacation I'll try Vista x64.

Edit Pt. 2: Trying harder

Another try. Uninstalled the Matrix Manager, which also uninstalls the driver and will make the system unbootable. Before rebooting I manually installed the new driver (iaahci). Runs nicely so far. There are significant changes in the latency behavior. I will keep an eye on that and report back how it worked out over the next couple of days.

Edit Pt. 3: A brigther future?
Works perfectly so far. No crackling at all without WLAN. With WLAN crackling occurring in longer intervals.

Edit Pt. 4: DVD-RW
Oh. Right. Really nice. My above mentioned only worked out so well because I had the DVD-drive removed for some days. After I put it back in, the same old story. Red bars only.

 

And how can I do it.. and can you post, what exactly driver iaahci is it...
I installed new ssd drive, and i have big issues with this. Before with WD i had ATA mode and it was fine.

 

Hello Powerusers ,

after having audio problems updating my E6500 I started to Google and ended up here. My problem was, after updating the latest drivers, audio was crackling badly. So I tried DPC Latency Checker and had complete red bars with a constant 10000 µs. I tried many things but no change. But than i figured out if i remove the DVD-Drive (PLSD DU-8A2S) from Modular Bay my latency gets to a satisfactory value (see pictures. Ok, i read normal is a latency up to 40 µs). Later i figured out if i install the Intel Matrix-Storage-Manager Driver V.8.2.2.1001 instead of the new V.8.7.0.1007 the problems are gone. But I don't know if it worked at the first time because I had some bluescreens before and tried to install the driver without DVD-Drive plugged in into Modular Bay. Important is that somehow the DVD-Drive can affect the latency of your system. That was not mentioned in this thread before.

The hardware WiFi switch can affect the latency too, but this was obvious (see picture).

Finally I have got two questions. I read that a latency up to 40 µs is normal but I don't know if this is true. Could somebody tell me what the normal latency for a Laptop is or confirm the 40 µs? And are latency peaks from 2000 to ∞ µs normal or not?


Thanks and I hope i didn't brought even more confusion to this thread.

 

At the moment, my best solution - though not perfect - has also been disabling the "media bay" in the BIOS, which should be about the same as removing the optical drive. While still enabled, my DPC latencies average 8000+ µs. While disabled, I average about 500 µs, but still have more occasional yellow spikes (above 1000 µs) than I'd care for, and even sporadic red spikes (above 2000 µs) - at least once every 30 seconds.

 

Hi everyone,

For me the same thing worked as for ziesemer. First i disabled everything non-essential in the BIOS and DPC showed everything was working fine. Then one by one i reenabled the devices and only with the modular bay (dunno if it's the same but on the m4400 the DVD can be replaced by a 1,8" HDD connected through eSATA) the latency came back. The normal eSATA/USB port didn't give any problems and neither did the wireless card. The onboard LAN however did bring back the red spikes but that's ok cause i never use that anyway.
All is running smooth now except for those two devices and i've tested both Vista 64 and XP

 

I found out something new. I disabled the modular bay and onboard LAN as it has already been mentioned and then ran the DPC latency check. It turns out every 55-60 seconds I get very bad latency. And when I say every, I mean every. It seems every 55-60 seconds something happens that causes bad latency. The hard disk doesn't seem to work harder or anything.
See the attached file, that's what I get (even now, got the prog still running).

Edit:
1. This happens whether I work on the notebook or just leave it untouched, idling.
2. I'm running Windows 7.

Edit 2:
I deactivated further stuff in Bios, now more 55-60 seconds latency.. green all the way! I'll keep you posted.

Edit 3:
Funny, I can produce ~4000us for exactly 1 seconds by using the Wlan-switch (turning it off or on again). Note that wlan is currently deactivated in Bios! This happens every time I use the switch! (either way)

Edit 4:
I can now confirm that wlan seems to be the culprit. I could never really confirm this on Vista, but now on W7 I definitely can. It produces the 55-60 seconds latency. I deactivated Band A and it seems to help at least a bit. I still get red peaks at exactly every 60 seconds, but only for 1 seconds instead of 2-4 seconds.
I got a Dell 1510 btw.

 

The E6400 is driving me crazy since simple things like audio will not play without crackling. I can't believe dell is just sitting there like there's no issue (I have talked to tech reps and they don't even acknowledge this problem exists).

The only thing that works for me is to turn off WLAN (i have the Dell 1510 card). But I need it to get on the net at all times. I have also noticed that flash videos on hulu.com become choppy/crackly and unwatchable after putting it on full screen for 10 mins (the cpu % goes wacky!). Ahh, I would love to trash this comp!

Specs: E6400, Vista 32, 2.4GHz, 4Gb Ram
Drivers: Intel Storage A02, Bios A11, IDT audio drivers.