Quadro NVS 420 Issue

[dotNetFreak]

Hi there,

Really hoping someone out there can help as I'm struggling to come up with a solution to this:

I've just replaced an NVidia 8600GTS 256MB with an NVidia Quadro NVS 420 512MB so that I could upgrade from a dual monitor setup to a triple (only have 1 onboard PCI-E x16), however I'm having a wierd problem.

If I have Windows Media Player 11 playing music in the background and use another application (e.g. IE or Excel) and scroll in the window the audio slows right down and is extremely jittery. It even happens if I just have IE open and move the mouse over some hyperlinks quickly.

I've tried just about everything I can think of and so far nothing has made any difference apart from running in 800x600!

I expected the Quadro to be a quicker card for day to day business use (no gaming or 3D work) as well being able to run 4 monitors, but it's feeling slow. Perhaps I was a little too optimistic and it simply isn't up to the job, but since NVidia say it can run 4 x 30" monitors and I'm struggling to get it to run 1 x 20" properly with music playing, I'm guessing that something is wrong...

Specs:

Dell Dimension 9200
Intel Core 2 Duo 6600 @ 2.4Ghz
4GB RAM

Vista Business 32bit SP2
Latest NVidia Drivers (Tried 3 other versions)

1 x Dell 2009W 20" Monitor
2 x Dell 2007WFP 20" Monitors

All running 1680 x 1050 @ 60Hz (Native)

Card connected via VHDCI -> 4 x DVI

I've so far tried connecting 1, 2 or 3 monitors at a time and also an Apple 20" display on its own. Same problem with all 4 monitors.

I noticed that the card was sharing IRQ 16 with the onboard audio, so installed a PCI sound card and disabled the onboard audio.

I've gone through the various resolutions supported by the monitors and the only resolution that seems to not have this problem is 800x600. The problem doesn't appear in any resolution if the window you are scrolling in is quite small.

DXDiag shows no issues and the card and monitors are detected fine.

PC is running the latest version of the BIOS.

Tried various settings in the NVidia control panel, nothing made a difference.

If anyone has got some more ideas that I can try it would be greatly appreciated!

 

[dotNetFreak]

I've also now tried disabling various USB ports to rule out any possible conflicts (however unlikely), turning off SERR messages in the BIOS, prioritising the IRQ of the card and I have also tried different DVI cables, again, nothing has made any difference.

Perhaps the card just isn't that capable, as when minimising or restoring maximised windows it's very sluggish. Although this would surprise me as it seems a reasonably spec'd card for what I'm doing.

Does anyone have any other ideas?

 

[madass]

I dont think it's the card- even a GeForce 6200 can manage at least one 22'' monitor, forget an NVS420.

 

[dotNetFreak]

Thanks for the reply. I'm struggling to believe it's the card either...

I've now tried it on a Dell 15" (1503FP) monitor via DVI at a native 1024 x 768 and it's exactly the same.

I've also tried disabling Aero and again, no difference, minimising and maximising a window is sluggish and the audio problem is still there. I've also tried playing one of the sample tracks installed by Vista to rule out the DVD drive and yet again the audio corrupts when scrolling a full screen window up and down.

Switching out the NVS420 for the old 8600GTS and no problems.

I'm going to try removing all of the NVidia drivers off of the system and reinstalling them using the latest download from NVidia.

Failing that I might try the card in another PC that currently has an ATI card in it and see what happens.

After that I guess the only possible thing I haven't tried is changing out the VHDCI cable for a different one, but I would have thought it unlikely that it would be causing the problem.