Realtek HD audio crackling

yep, same here... just installed 195.39 and found the right keys in my registry... attempting h0w1er's solution right away...

 

I just listened to two full songs, with absolutely no latency spikes. Thanks so much h0w1er!

 

I'm not recommending to use this one. I've tested it as first.
It works fine w/o spikes but driver itself is unstable...

And the winner of the "BlueScreen of Death" is ....[drum].... nVidia 195.39 Beta ! [dong!]

So, 191.07 is ok.

 

well correct me if i'm wrong but I installed 195.39 and have not changed the keys in my registry yet and the crackling sounds are gone!

so it appears nvidia has fixed this problem and if 195.39 is unstable sooner or later they will release stable drivers with no crackling sounds, and we wont have to go and modify settings in regedit, yay!

 

mmm back up a bit

sound crackling is gone, but the million dollar question is...

....


are the big latency spikes gone aswell?

 

NO! I still have them.

 

ha!

back to square one!

i cant even find the registry entries in regedit with the latest drivers

blacky is it 57-65kish spikes?

 

I've had DPC Latency Checker running for 1.5 hours, and my enormous latency spikes are gone. Of course, this is with 195.39 as my driver.

I used to get one spike every fifteen seconds or so.

 

im using the same driver and there are no such registry entries

 

are there any bios experts here

found this:

could may as well be something similar for us

 

Yeah, exactly around there.

 

no such spikes here... my longest latencies are in the order of 2ms (2000us)

 

Just leave it run for a while. I get them rarely so they don't bother me.

 

Blacky mate i think im down to the bottom of this

try this:

first disable powermizer. either by downloading powermizer switch which will create the registry entries (run as administrator), or if you happen to have them already, follow kevin's instructions to update the entries.

to make sure that its off , download gpu-z, but make sure that "continue refreshing while gpu-z is in the backround" is checked. (riva tuner doesnt work with the new drivers)

next, disable the wifi from device manager, and fn+f11 to power it off.

plug the ethernet in and report back

as you may have understood already, its "most likely", *fingers crossed* a combo of both powermizer and wifi screwwing with our brains

 

since i've installed the 195.39 modded desktop drivers from laptopvideo2go, my average gpu temps on iddle have gone up from 43 to 48C and my cpu temps from 31 to 36C, is this normal?

h0w1er warned us that disabling PowerMizer would increase our temps but I havent disabled it yet...

EDIT: My bad... the reason for higher temps was not the new drivers but the fact that my desktop was extended to an external monitor. I connect this monitor once in a while but for some reason by default each time i change video settings it extends the display no matter whether the monitor is connected or not.

 

blacky did this work out for you?

im at 50ish idle with powermizer off btw (gpu). full clocks full time

 

I didn't try it. As I said, the big spikes are very rare and I like to have variable clocks in order to keep the laptop cool. So for now I will work with it as such.

 

its not like the laptop is going to be boiling, im sitting on 45-50 degrees on idle with powermizer off, which is only a 7 degree rise

besides, its only when its on AC

give it a go for a few hrs/days

 

Yeah, as I expected disabling PowerMizer keeps the GPU at around 52C and the fans are constantly running -> not very pleasant. But yeah, not latency spikes anymore.

 

even with the wifi on?

 

Even with wifi on souroull.

 

well my 5300 is causing spikes aswell

got my paypal sorted today so ordering an atheros !

 

I don't know much about wireless cards. So are the Atheros Wifi cards the best on the market? My Intel 5300 has be frustrating at times, so I might change it.

 

a short search revealed that its the best alternative.

not only they work great, but my dlink routers use an atheros chip, so the "compatibility" is supposed to be far superior

problem is that i have no idea if its going to work or not. i cant find any loose cards to buy, only cards pulled from lenovo and mac which use them as std

 

I might consider buying one as well then. Ebay is the place of choice for me .

 

Here is a website where you can buy.
http://www.oxfordtec.com/uk/product...tm_campaign=googlebase_uk&source=googlebaseuk

 

hm thats mini pci not pcie, and that site doesnt seem to have any of the pcie atheros cards

in any case i got an ar5008 off ebay as soon as i read that royal mail is not going on strike lol

let the wait begin.

PS: ive been spikeless since yesterday with the wifi and powermizer off

 

It does, they wifi cards build on the AR9002 Atheros chip, I think this is the latest one.

But you are right, none are Mini Pci express.

 

ok so interestingly enough I thought my problem was fixed just by installing drivers 195.39 WITHOUT deactivating PowerMizer in regedit...

but the reason why I did not have the crackling sounds was because my desktop was extended to an external display, therefore cranking up the workload on the GPU. while my GPU was busy providing data to an external monitor, it did not use the PowerMizer feature to reduce its clock, so I had the impression that the problem was solved.

Going back to standard flat-panel display, the crackling sounds came back. Conclusion: drivers 195.39 do not solve the problem, we still need to manually disable PowerMizer.

 

yea just download powermizer switch and do it. theres an option to keep it for when its off AC so you still get to keep your battery life.

as for when its plugged in, makes no difference to me. temps are slightly higher and didnt really notice the fans kicking in more often.

 

ok i've been wondering... i dont have much experience with GPU clocks and stuff but maybe we dont have to "lock" the clocks to a constant state.

does anyone know how many clock levels PowerMizer uses? let's say it uses 5 different levels... perhaps the latency spikes only happens when it transitions from level 1 to level 2 and back, but does not happen for transitions 2-3-4-5.

In this case it would be a bit overkill to lock the GPU to level 5. A better solution would be to remove level 1 entirely and keep levels 2-3-4-5.

Would that make sense or am I completely off?

 

its 4 different ones, with no2 and 3 being really close to each other.

they all randomly cause the spikes

 

It makes sense but I think the spikes don't matter from what level to what level the shift happens, it's the change in clocks regardless of the level that affects them.

 

haha ok thanks for the info... i figured I would give it a shot but obviously smarter people already thought about this

let's disable PowerMizer while we wait for fixed drivers

 

Looks like it.

 

Update: runing the creative notebook xfi (pci express) is even worse, now I have constant popping and crackling when i'm listening to music. Who's the blame here?

I thought by running the audio on a separate bus (no interaction with the GPU) the problem would have been solved???

This is so much easier if we can blame a company

Whats the main diff between sagers own drivers (rebranded?) vs the one's on http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ ?

I'm gonna try a driver from laptopvideo2go.com right now, i'm not holding my breath.

But still how could I still have these issues, or is still a another creative bug in their awful products?

 

Nope, it's just a conflict between DX 11 x64 and Nvidia drivers, or somewhere along those lines.
I use X-fi and with powermizer off, there is no crackling.

 

Oh splendid another xfi user

I'm using sagers nvidia drivers 186.47, no powermizer reg found at all. Which drivers are you using? I'm gonna try the most recent one and see if the reg entry is added.

Thank You


Update: Running 191.66 disabled powermizer (my thanks h0w1er) no poping or crackling so far, but time will tell i'm gonna run a few flac and movies just to be sure.

BTW Isn't this "problem" an old one? Is nvidia aware of the issues, creative? a quick googling on xfi and audio issues gives a heck of a lot of results

 

For me it started in October, I think it coincides with some Win7 OS patches that MS released. It is only present in Win7 x64.
Oh, and I am using 195.39 beta drivers.

 

Yeah I agree, it's not present on the most recent kernel at all (archlinux), so it seems it's win7 related.

Thanks for your help sir

Haven't had a single audio glitch yet since i've removed powerizer, although the fans are a tad louder during a normal session but that doesn't bother me much.

Also thanks for the tip h0w1e

 

i think ive isolated the powermizer spikes to ~55kms and the wifi spikes to ~67kms

in any case my atheros wifi should have arrived today but now here yet. bleh.

 

I've switched to 191.07. The Powermizer tricks works just as well as on 195.39, and without the bugs of the latter.

 

195.39 works fine for me.

BTW, which power scheme are you guys using under windows7? i just realized that the high performance scheme under windows 7 is "hidden" and that you need to go to the power options to enable it. doing so wiped out all the small intermediate spikes of the wifi and now i'm completely green even with the wifi on!!

PS. the big and rare wifi spikes ive been having are still there tho, still waiting on the atheros, hoping monday/tuesday it'll be here

 

Hmm, I seem to be one of the unlucky ones suffering this to some extent. Its not all the time though like those using the M17x, I've tried disabling powermizer and I've disabled the wireless 5400 PRO card via device manager but I still get them intermittently.

I'll be watching this thread intently, as it'd be nice to *completely* kill these off.

 

I also had similar problem with this. Music was crackling and laggy especially when browsing with IE and FF to web pages with flash and images. Also happened when I copied some files over hard drives.

I used to clean my startup programs on msconfig.exe as well, hoping the system won't be heavy. But it turned up that removing IAAnotif.exe (Event Monitor for Intel Matrix Storage) from the list was my mistake. After I ticked that back and restarted my windows, suddenly the problem has gone away.
I'm not sure about this, but maybe this can also fix your problem guys.
Cheers.

 

Wait? So what did you do ?

 

watch your GPU clocks to make sure that powermizer is indeed not downclocking the card.

also, disable the wifi at both device manager AND fn+f11


something else you may want to check is the realtec settings. try to enable "immediate mode" in:

Control Panel > Sound > Playback Devices > Properties on Speakers > Enhancements

 

Tried disabling via hotkey and device manager, and disabling powermizer via the registry key, was still doing it and I tried intermediate mode but still randomly got 65k DPC spikes now and then (again noway near as much as the M17x guys, but it was still happening). Unfortunately I have an SLI machine, and IIRC even if you disable the powermizer via registry, it only seems to switch it off on one card.

That said the guys I bought the machine from didnt recognise the issue as a common one when I spoke to them on lunch today (I only recieved the machine on Friday), and along with another possible speaker wiring issue (right rear audio sounds like it might be coming from the sub) have decided they're going to collect the machine and take a look in the workshop incase it's a dodgy chassis or some other problem they can try and resolve, it wasn't unliveable, but seeing as I am very into my music, I'd rather they swap my machine out if that fixes it!

Mine is an M980NU based machine btw.

 

ah yeah, the infamous sli spikes. did you try disabling one of the cards to see if it resolves the problem?

 

i do have these crackling as well sometimes but its very rare and i dont wanna switch off the powermizer because i think thats a feature which should be enabled, dont wanna listen to full running coolers all the time.

i disabled the beep sound from the speakers even if im using the digital output and maybe it works i dont know. the crakcling is very rare so i can say that only after some time...