Strange problem inflicted by EasyTune

I've just recently begun to overclock with EasyTune, something of which I was skeptical of for a while. I have a strange problem which I found directly linked to EasyTune..

I wanted to keep my clocks and voltages low for browsing the web and such, and only pump them up for gaming - to prolong the hardware life. So I would boot with a 2.8 overclock at stock voltages and keep the memory divider and timings at the same settings as I would use in my 3.0 overclock. Then I could open EasyTune and raise the FSB and voltages when I wanted to game. During the while I was doing this, a peculiar problem happened during game cutscenes - and only cutscenes - like the memories in Prototype or the storylines beginning before each level in COD4. The audio would crack, pop, and get out of sync with the video. ONLY during cutscenes. Now I had just added a hard drive which I thought was the cause, mainly because I rebooted the computer, unplugged the drive, went back to the game (without changing the clocks in EasyTune as I would normally you see), and the audio worked normally. So I figured the drive must be poorly grounded, and changed the power plugs around, booted back up (without using EasyTune again), and the problem was gone. Fantastic, I thought, it's fixed! To shorten a longer story, the problem came back (later when I used EasyTune) and I became horribly frustrated, changing timings, switching power plugs to no effect, not realizing the cause of the problem.

Alas, changing the clocks in BIOS create no ill audio effects in cutscenes, but changing to those exact clocks in EasyTune make the audio snap and crackle. Just thought I'd share my story with those of you who may be experiencing obscure problems and are using EasyTune.

--just found a nice big thread about similar problems using EasyTune over here

--after reading that another user noticed ETcall.exe having a marginal effect on latency here, this seems like a good explanation for the problem I was experiencing.

funny, I was just admiring that quote over at http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] -problems. That's damn good reasoning.

I actually do make use of the slots in the BIOS (very useful), but I wanted to save my hard drives the expense of starting and stopping. You make an extremely compelling point however, especially here:

And I was using the incorrect version, but after weighing the importance of the hardware with the shittiness of this program I'm just gonna restrict overclocking to BIOS. I may test out EasyTune 5 - the version I should have been using, however as you wrote, it seems likely that new BIOS revisions (which I do apply) may not be completely functional with the EasyTune software, and I don't think anyone will argue Gigabyte's incompetence - especially in not updating EasyTune to fully support all overlcocking motherboards - that just seems lazy.

Just, out of curiosity, took a count - just for socket 775s, they support (well, actually, don't support) 40 Intel northbridges alone, with three to eight boards based on each one! Totally INSANE!! Is it any wonder they can't keep three versions of [not-so]EasyTune updated??