Asus Maximus Formula and soundcards/ onboard

Hello all, I have tried the onboard Supreme FX, an X-Fi Audigy, and an
Auzentech X-Fi in my board, and all have horrendous static and stuttering
going on. System is: Q6600 o/c to 3.0Ghz, 8Gb ram, Terratec Cinergy 2400 tv
card, Ati HD3870, and an Ageia PhysX card. OS is Vista Home Premium 64bit,
all patched to most recent. (bios not current- can't figure out how to flash
it in Vista 64) Speakers are Logitech Z580's over an optical connection,
which works flawlessly on my other PC- Win XP64 - I am thinking of a clean
reinstall, but can anyone offer any other advice? Thinking back, things may
have gotten worse after installing the HD3870, but I have no definite point
that I can say that's when things went south. TIA, Carl

 

Just to add, I got the bios updated to 0903, still noisy audio!

 

I have a couple possible theories, one of which you can experiment with.

Audio doesn't work well, when interrupt response latency is poor.
The audio device, asks for data when there is very little left in
whatever buffer it uses. It asserts an IRQ. Then, it DMA transfers
some more audio samples over the system busses.

Since you aren't likely to find an application that allows tuning
the system busses, that leaves playing with IRQs as a possible
solution.

Open your Maximus Formula manual to the IRQ table
"IRQ assignments for this motherboard". That is easier to
do with the PDF version of the document.

Notice how the PCI slots share with a lot of other devices.
My plan would be:

1) Switch to using the LAN interface that is connected to the
"A" column. I know the two of them are identical looking,
so that may be easier said than done.
2) Move any PCI Express x1 card, out of PCI Express x1 slot 1
and into slot 2 or slot 3 of the three available.
3) Install the PCI sound card in PCI slot 2.

By doing that, even though the "B" column is shared by three
things, a little cleverness will end up with the PCI slot 2
card being by itself.

That is the best experiment I can come up with.

There was a time, when latency tuning on PCI bus slots was
available. I believe there was an application to do that.
But such an application won't have aged gracefully, and
it might simply be the wrong tool for the job now.

It has been a known fact, for at least some specialized
computer applications (involving the installation of custom
hardware in PCI slots), that the new PCI Express boards
are not very friendly when it comes to bus sharing. The
data bursts that the video card makes, can be a factor.
Now, that should have been recognized when it happened, and
be on the checklist of things to fix on new chipsets. So
I hope that your problem has nothing to do with past issues
seen in that regard. PCI Express is packetized, and the
data packets sent on the PCI Express bus can be large ones.
Doing so, reduces the impact of the header size, on
data transfer performance.

Paul

 

I noticed a similar effect once when connecting a SATA dvdrom drive to the
JMicron controller on a different model motherboard.

 

Thanks Paul and Fred, I'll give that a blast when next off work!

 

Found the culprit, it was caused by a faulty Ageia PhysX card.

 

Did that affect the operation of the PhysX card itself ?

Just wondering, in case someone else asks about one of those.

Paul

 

I think that it did indeed, as a few capacitors on the PhysX board were
fried, I removed that, and an old Raptor 74 Gb hard drive, which was my C
drive. I have reinstalled with AHCI enabled on 4 WD 500Gb drives,
performance thing in vista now gives 5.9 result for everything!