Good to hear its working well. Everything I’ve read in the last few days says the 5000 series is fairly quiet. I’m thinking I may get the 5850 now though to keep performance up in newer games. I might wait until prices drop though since my 7950gt runs Wow and torchlight well enough.
The good news is that if your computer explodes, you won’t be able to come here and blame us for it!
Well, unless you find another computer, that is.
But there will be a delay! A delay!
I’m just floored by how quiet it is. Wow.
Well, it looks like my optimism was premature. I played Overlord at lunchtime today and the sound was stuttering and the onscreen graphics did the same thing. I had a similar sound stuttering problem last night with King’s Bounty.
When I had problems with the sound last night I updated the Realtek HD Audio driver to the most current Win7 64-bit driver and thought I corrected the problem and maybe it was King’s Bounty related.
I’ll be testing a bit more, but I think 350W isn’t enough for this setup, or the Dell Power Supplies just aren’t up to the task. I may pull the one out of my other box and hook it up in this one as a test. That one is 430W IIRC, and I’ve never had issues there. Not looking foward to messing with all that cabling. sigh
One thing I’m not sure of is running all this stuff on Win7 64-bit, where maybe the game just has issues with that OS as it relates to sound. Not much I can do but play tech head for awhile to figure it all out.
I’d chalk that up to sound driver issues. Do some searching on it. I’ve never encountered sound stuttering due to power consumption, that doesn’t seem to make much sense.
I did some searches last night but didn’t find anything relevant. Plus, I’ve now got the latest sound driver. It’s also only been happening since I put in the new video card, as far as I can remember anyway.
This seems like one of those nebulous problems that I think will take a lot of testing to figure out.
Seconded. Audio stuttering is not a sign of a PSU issue. Blue screens, app crashes, video drivers quitting – those could be PSU related. But not audio stuttering.
Hmmm… I ran across this thread when I did another search (“realtek hd audio driver problem win7 64-bit” in Google).
Going to try the one thing listed in there later tonight…
If this only started after getting the new card, then I would still point at possible driver conflict. Or perhaps a lack of BUS throughput?
I think I may have found something…
Looks like there’s something that gets installed for HDMI audio with the ATI card and it may be butting heads with the onboard audio. I’ll be trying to disable that other audio controller tonight. I know I saw that in Device Manager last night when I was updating the driver for Realtek.
I too am experiencing this issue. System in question has Realtek audio and ethernet along with an ATI Radeon HD 3600 series video card. The video card chipset may support audio, but the card itself does not have audio output. Updating to the latest ATI and Realtek drivers do not resolve the issue. However, disabling the Microsoft “High Definition Audio Controller” resolves the issue.
I am aware that this may be a workaround with an incompatibility between ATI and Realtek. However, as my video card does not support audio-out, and Catalyst does not offer an option to disable the non-existent sound, this seems to be the most viable option at the moment.
Makes sense, IIRC I read that some of these newer vid cards will pass sound data out the hdmi port for movies/HT setup etc. so a driver is installed for that and it is conflicting with the realtek drivers. Something I’ll have to watch for myself when I upgrade.
I’m actually surprised at how decent the realtek HD soundchip is (newer gigabyte board), I’ve not been a fan of onboard sound (nforce1 was ok but only the digital out) but this one so far sounds better than the X-fi I’ve been using. Only issue has been my logitech 5500 speakers, the sub has a weird hum when powered on now that I can’t figure out the cause of.
Well, I hate to get optimistic again and say “That fixed it!” but well, that seems to have fixed it! I was able to play Overlord, Serious Sam HD and Call of Duty 4 for about three or more hours last night with no stuttering and Sam had given me the problem before too.
I really pushed the system by playing pretty much nonstop during that time and was listening and watching for any obvious problems. None developed.
So if you get one of these newfangled cards with HDMI out on it, watch out for it installing a sound driver you may not want and that may cause conflicts.
Well, I think I finally figured this out and it was d) none of the above.
I’m pretty sure that the sound problem was happening only after the machine came out of sleep mode. I don’t have links handy, but I did some searches and discovered that the Dells seem to have this issue where the sound gets screwed up after coming out of sleep.
I really like the sleep mode because it shuts almost completely off when it’s powered down like that, but it will pop up really fast for me to use it at one click on the mouse.
As long as I do a restart, I haven’t had any issues with sound. I’ll continue testing.
I’ve never thought of it as a ‘Dell thing’ but I always come back to the use of Sleep Mode and/or Hibernation when any of my clients complain about sporadic issues. I get it that people like these features but it never appears as though they work as well as they need to. Microsoft always blames the manufacturers and the manufacturers always blame Microsoft. If you’ve got a particular PC that you use in a particular way and Sleep mode is a part of that and you AREN’T having problems… congrats. But for anyone else I would always say to try just shutting down between uses and avoid the many and unforeseeable pitfalls.
(I’m not directing that at you in particular, Dave; it just brought it to mind.)
No offense taken.
I can definitely just get into the habit of shutting down. Startup is so much faster on this box than it’s ever been since the days of DOS only.
If I know it’s been into sleep, I just need to restart. That’s doable. I think what’s frustrating is it creates an intermittent problem so you end up running around looking for solutions and you think you have it figured out and then it happens again. It really takes a lot of trial and error and you’re not looking at the real issue the entire time.
I never used sleep on my old box, so this was something I just thought “Hey, this seems really cool and seems to work!” but now I know better. It never worked right at all on the old machine.
FWIW, I have a similar issue on my Dell desktop – the NIC doesn’t come back alive from sleep. It’s apparently a driver issue, and last time I looked, it wasn’t fixed. Mostly I just turn sleep off and don’t worry about it.