Modem #0: Possible Issue

[mrvanhes]

Note: This relates to sound mostly and not sound cards outright, but this seemed the best place to post. Gimme a break, I'm new here.

So I've been having horrible sound issues on my computer for a long while, specifically on PC games. The issue is that sound is irredeemably choppy on very many games.
Original: Dell Dimension 3000
Intel Extreme Graphics 2 (82865G controller) integrated video
SoundMAX integrated sound
Modified: Radeon X1300 PCI (was Radeon 9250 PCI a week ago)
Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS Gamer Edition

I've followed dell.com's procedure for enabling new sound cards and video cards on the Dimension 3000, and still have some issues that I'm fairly confident are caused in some part to onboard devices. Video display is up to adequate FPS in the afformentioned games, and the new card has DirectX9.0c and the latest pixel shaders models, etc. The onboard sound can be outright disabled in BIOS options, and now doesn't appear in device manager, so I think I can count that out. The onboard graphics, however, can't be disabled in BIOS and still appears in the device manager (and is disabled there).

Also, I've gone into DXDiag.exe and minimized the "Hardware Sound Acceleration Level". In the "Troubleshoot" tab in Advanced Display Properties, I've manually moved Hardware Acceleration to as low as it can be with still running. None of these have undone the afformentioned sound issue.

If anyone can help me I would be incredibly thankful.

 

[darkstar782]

PCI is a shared bus archetecture.

That is, there is 133MiB/s shared between all PCI devices.

The graphics card will be able to saturate that many times over, leaving little bandwidth for the soundcard to get a look in.

Thats more than likely your issue, and the only solution is AGP or PCI-E, meaning new motherboard and Graphics card.

 

[Tug]

Many onboard sound cards suck power from the CPU since there is not a lot of extra room for electronic devices on the motherboard. I use my sound card mostly for recording music and not for games, but when the kids got interested in playing games, they experienced the same choppiness you're talking about so I disabled the onboard sound and installed a SoundBlaster Live on that computer and the choppiness went away. I think I payed about $15 USD from Ebay for that sound card a few years back.

I now have an Audigy 1 and Audigy 2 in the recording computer and I use the kX drivers instead of the Creative Labs drivers. Lots of gamers choose to stay with the Creative Drivers since kX doesn't support EAX.

 

[darkstar782]

He has disabled the onboard sound and is running an Audigy 2.

His problem is almost certainly PCI bus saturation imho.

 

[mrvanhes]

Hm, well, that sucks! I mean, thanks a ton, that's probably the smartest explanation I've heard, but wow. Anywho doesn't really matter too much, in the middle of making a new PC anyhow.

Thanks a ton, guys!

 

[darkstar782]

You have two possible solutions if you dont want to upgrade right now:

1. Mess about with the PCI latency option in the BIOS, trying different values between about 32 and 64. Hopefully you can get it to a value where the Gfx card doesnt quite saturate the bus. You may not have this option in a limited Dell BIOS.

2. Try the onboard sound, this may have its own link to the southbridge rather than use a PCI lane. Failing this pick up a USB sound card. There are high end options from Creative, like the Extigy and the new X-Fi based one, or cheap ones that come with $40 Plantronics headsets. This should avoid PCI saturation.

I know option 2 kinda sucks as its a bit of a waste of your decent soundcard, but I figure a slightly higher CPU load and 2 channel sound that doesnt stutter is better than sound that does stutter....

 

[bacis]

hi.
the device Modem #0 windows seen that as a audio device
and this is your moden.
i also have that device.
be sure that you use soundblaster as sound card and not moden#0.

 

[duthoy]

too much traffic on the PCI-bus
really sucks, like riding a ferarri and having traffic jams all day.

 

[mrvanhes]

Hm, you bring up some good points there, Darkstar, but the reason I bought the PCI sound card in the first place was that my audio was doing the same "choppy thing" when I was just using my integrated one. Surely then my sound flow itself can't be bogged down, since it's not using the PCI bus when integrated is on, right?

 

[darkstar782]

It could be.

It depends on the implimentation to be honest, alot of onboard devices effectively do run in various slots.

For example, the Asus P5W DH's Ethernet controllers are both connected via PCIe x1, even though there is no physical slot. The WLAN device is connected via USB2.0, even though again there is no physical port.

Unless the sound is actually on the southbridge, it will be provided by some external chip, which more than likely sits on a PCI bus.

The way to test it I suppose would be to remove the x1300, and see if the choppyness is still there with the onboard Gfx, which are likely AGP.

 

[mrvanhes]

In a twist of fate, I cannot run any of the applications/games that cause this choppy sound issue with the integrated Intel Extreme Graphics alone (i.e. without a PCI video card). I've just tried the same applications with the Omega Radeon drivers and the issue was not resolved with them, so I believe it's safe to deduce that it isn't a driver issue.

If only there was a way to remove the Intel graphics from Windows' recognition of it in device manager. Now that Windows doesn't recognize the onboard sound I think it's safe to say that that isn't the issue either (though that should've been apparent to me when a new sound card didn't solve the issue).

EDIT: Okay, a bit of a 'P.S.' here: I've noticed that after some of these applications have run, that a process shows up in Task Manager as igfxsrvc.exe. I looked it up on file.net and found that it is indeed related to Intel onboard graphics. Maybe this has something to do with it?

 

[Wgfalcon]

be sure to uninstall the drivers for onboard sound and video and run msconfig to disable anything related to them. also scan for spyware . if all else fails maybe an os reinstall with the new cards installed. good luck

 

[darkstar782]

Yes, run msconfig (just type msconfig into a Winkey+R box) and disable anything you are unsure of in the startup section.

Infact, actually, just for testing, disable EVERYTHING in the startup tab there.

Goto the services tab and check the 'hide all microsoft services' box. check there isnt too much in there, if there is anything related to the Intel gfx, disable that too. Careful disabling other stuff in this tab as it can mess things up if you disable essential MS services this way (hence checking the hide box)

Disable the Intel gfx in device manager.

Reboot, hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, check how many processes are running in the processes tab, for testing under 20 is good.

Check the performance tab, check how much physical RAM is free and post that here along with your total RAM and pagefile size.

 

[mrvanhes]

I've disabled everything in startup quite a while ago, but I just removed the recently-added Nero startup processes too.

Under MSConfig Services, I have three processes left after hiding all Microsoft services: InstallDriver Table Manager, NBService (Nero related), Windows Media Connect service. I'm hesitant to uncheck the InstallDriver one, plus it's stopped right now (before and after a run of the afformentioned applications). However, knowing the slyness of this integrated card, it might actually be significant for all I know.

I disabled the Intel GFX in device manager a while ago, but it still had issues, regardless of if drivers for the intel gfx were present at the time of their disabling.

Not counting task manager being open, on average my processes running are about thirteen.

I've left Windows' paging file at 2046MB (it's default when I purchased this computer) and I have a total of 2GB of DDR PC3200 CL2 RAM. Windows' marks its Commit Charge as about 350MB of nearly 4GB available.

 

[mrvanhes]

IRQs: Creative Audigy 2 ZS: 17.
Onboard sound card: unrecognized, does not appear in device manager, disabled in BIOS.
Radeon X1300: 21, shares IRQ with "PCI-to-PCI bridge".
Intel 82801EB SMBus Controller: 04.
OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller: 18.
Primary IDE Channel: 14.
Secondary IDE Channel: 15.
Standard Floppy Disk Controller: 06.

Hope that narrows it down guys, this is a huge help. Is there a way for me to tell my IRQ configurations in a matter that doesn't require manually checking?

 

[mrvanhes]

I have three PCI slots, and currently the video card is at the top (closest to the CPU) and the Audigy sound card is at the bottom, farthest from the video card. This positioning doesn't seem to be a factor, as I recently moved the sound card from the middle position (right beside the Radeon).

Another monkey wrench in this equation is that the Dell A03 BIOS doesn't have a "disable onboard gfx" setting, but the closest it gets is under Legacy Options for disabling the onboard sound, and the integrated intel video is only "on" or "auto". Currently it's on Auto, but that still allows it to appear in device manager.

EDIT: Ok this is sure one heck of a strange occurance. I just got the new game Phantasy Star Universe and it runs -slow-. It runs at maybe 20 FPS BUT the sound on it works -flawlessly-, but only when the game isn't running a full movie sequence (cutscenes run fine). I looked up the system requirements on this game and realized its minimum is a Radeon 8500, which is only available in PCI format (from what I've seen at least). In movie sequences though, the video gets choppy as well as the sound. I did a little extra research to see if some friends of mine who have PCI video cards would have issues with choppy sound during the movies, and not only do they not, but they don't have choppy audio issues with any of the other applications that do this to me as well.

Once more, thanks a lot guys, I'm indebted.

Double Edit: Strange enough, it seems lessening the settings on these games decreases the choppiness by quite a bit, eliminating some chop when it comes to certain movie sequences and so forth. Now before everyone calls me a horse's ass and points to the obvious fact that games run faster without the bells and whistles enabled, the chop is still present on minimum settings for most every application that's given me trouble. At 2GB RAM, 3.0GHz processor, and a 256MB X1300 GPU (albeit PCI), it's still quite a shock that rather resource-unintensive games cause this issue. I'm beginning to wonder if some things in DirectX are being sent through my disabled Intel chip...

 

[darkstar782]

I have three PCI slots, and currently the video card is at the top (closest to the CPU) and the Audigy sound card is at the bottom, farthest from the video card. This positioning doesn't seem to be a factor, as I recently moved the sound card from the middle position (right beside the Radeon).

Another monkey wrench in this equation is that the Dell A03 BIOS doesn't have a "disable onboard gfx" setting, but the closest it gets is under Legacy Options for disabling the onboard sound, and the integrated intel video is only "on" or "auto". Currently it's on Auto, but that still allows it to appear in device manager.

EDIT: Ok this is sure one heck of a strange occurance. I just got the new game Phantasy Star Universe and it runs -slow-. It runs at maybe 20 FPS BUT the sound on it works -flawlessly-, but only when the game isn't running a full movie sequence (cutscenes run fine). I looked up the system requirements on this game and realized its minimum is a Radeon 8500, which is only available in PCI format (from what I've seen at least). In movie sequences though, the video gets choppy as well as the sound. I did a little extra research to see if some friends of mine who have PCI video cards would have issues with choppy sound during the movies, and not only do they not, but they don't have choppy audio issues with any of the other applications that do this to me as well.

Once more, thanks a lot guys, I'm indebted.

Double Edit: Strange enough, it seems lessening the settings on these games decreases the choppiness by quite a bit, eliminating some chop when it comes to certain movie sequences and so forth. Now before everyone calls me a horse's ass and points to the obvious fact that games run faster without the bells and whistles enabled, the chop is still present on minimum settings for most every application that's given me trouble. At 2GB RAM, 3.0GHz processor, and a 256MB X1300 GPU (albeit PCI), it's still quite a shock that rather resource-unintensive games cause this issue. I'm beginning to wonder if some things in DirectX are being sent through my disabled Intel chip...

The Radeon 8500 was the competitor to the Geforce 3 Ti500. Nowadays you might only get hold of it in PCI, but it was availible in AGPx2 and AGPx4.

That the sound gets less choppy with lower settings supports the fact that the PCI bus is saturated. Gfx cards may not be able to fill PCIe x16, but PCI is 1/32 of that speed, and its unidirectional, so if all 16 PCIe links are fully used in both directions, 64 times the speed of PCI.

As you turn down Gfx load, expecially texture resolution and the like, the PCI load decreases. Even at the low end, recent games will still saturate it. Games like the R8500 minimum game will be much less graphically complex and generate a much lower PCI loading, PCI was still in relatively common use back then.

Nothing is being sent through the Intel gfx adaptor. Its not connected to the monitor, and if it were doing something while the ATI was connected, it would be some funky ATI+Intel version of crossfire, which isnt possible

 

[mrvanhes]

beerandcandy, the intel device is disabled in device manager.

Darkstar, that's a good and humorous point and I think I'm ready to accept my fate because of it. Saturation or not though, if an 8500 is the minimum requirement, and the 8500 has combined core and memory speeds that are nowhere near even half the maximum speed of the PCI bus, wouldn't the 8500 simply not have saturation issues? Note: Yes I know game developers are out of their minds and often have minimum requirements that are outright false.

 

[mrvanhes]

I'm assuming by "AA" you mean anti-aliasing. Yes with my current card I've not used anti-aliasing, and am at 640x480 resolution. At the minimum settings now, the game is running, though at approximately 20-30 FPS. That's expected on my end of things (3GHz and 2GB RAM can only do so much on their own), and the sound on this particular application is adequate now. I guess from now on I'll try to remember that 60FPS in terms of graphics doesn't equate to sound keeping up at that refresh rate.

Edit: I've just tried two of the afflicted applications with a different computer (AMD 3200+, 768MB RAM, PCI GeForceFX5500, onboard sound, no onboard gfx) and have seen that it doesn't have the sound issue that my computer does. So I removed my PCI Audigy 2 ZS from my computer and now only have my Radeon X1300 on my PCI slot 0 and the onboard sound is recognized as being on location 0 as well.

Once more, any help is welcome.