Want a new CPU and mainboard

[bcrew1375]

No, believe me, I've checked all those things.

 

[bcrew1375]

Eh, screw it. I just bought a new sound card. That seems to have fixed the problem.

 

[BoggyB]

I've encountered my first problem. It's a sound card issue. I would use the onboard audio, but it's a Realtek AC97, and I've heard nothing but bad things about them, and it wouldn't work when I did try it. So, I made sure to disable it in the BIOS and I planned on using my old ESS Canyon 3D 2. It served me well with my old desktop. It plays sound, but every once in a while, the sound will skip. When I try playing videos, the videos will freeze for a second, then play through at a really fast speed, then play normal for a few seconds. I've installed the same drivers I used before. All of Windows settings are the same as last time I used the card. The only thing I figure could really be affecting it is the change in motherboard. The motherboard is DFI NF4-DAGF. So, I looked for some motherboard problems. I found something I hadn't heard of before. I heard that some motherboards need to have the PCI clock locked, though this should only change anything if you do any overclocking, which I haven't. For a while I was thinking it might be a IRQ conflict, but I'm not so sure anymore. I checked my PCI speed with ClockGen and it tells me it is 33.49. Though that is a very small amount, I'm wondering if it could be the cause of the problem, and if so, how can I fix it? BTW, I'm 99% certain this is a sound card issue because if I uninstall the card in Device Manager, videos play fine.

I had related problems at one time. In my case it turned out that the sound card (SB 4.1 Live) and the motherboard chipset (VIA KT133A/686B) just don't get along. If you're unlucky, that's the sort of situation you're in.

The PCI clock should be 33MHz, so 33.49 is close enough (the error's on the order of 1 or 2%, which can be put down to inaccuracies in measuring it). IRQ conflicts are unlikely in this day and age - the problems of multiple devices sharing one IRQ was solved many years ago. You could try changing the order of PCI cards in your case - as a rule of thumb you should avoid the first PCI slot as it generally shares resources with the AGP one. Your BIOS may list "INT pin assignments" or similar, which will show you which cards are sharing request lines (related to IRQs) - there can be as few as 4 and it can help to spread the cards out across them. You could also try changing the PCI Latency setting in the BIOS (if present), but I suggest you do more research before changing that as it can cause problems if you set it wrong.

*reads latest post*

Or you could do what I eventually did, which was to give up and stick a different sound card in