Sound Freezing Often Causes BSOD During Games

[BigCTM]

I have an Acer G7710 Predator PC that has Realtek audio on board. While playing Dragon Age and Titan Quest, the sound freezes and often causes a BSOD. It starts with the sound cracking and popping and rather quickly either freezes the system or causes a BSOD.

My first step was to install a sound card. I have a basic Sound Blaster Audigy Value edition card and installed it and disabled the onboard audio. To my surprise, it freezes exactly like the Realtek one did.

The odd thing is that if I reboot I can go back and play the games without any issues. This freezing seems to only occur if I start playing after the PC has been running 30 minutes or so. I have honestly just started rebooting every time before I play and it seems to help with the freezing.

I have read countless forums and tried various fixes and nothing works. I have honestly thought about buying an external sound card and seeing what happens. I have read many others who have this exact same issue and cannot find a solution.
This is the only issue I have with this PC but it's a nagging one for sure.

 

[Lomai]

Hi
Welcome to Seven Forums

Have you tried updating the drivers (newer BIOS if available on the support page) for your PC?
Does this happen for only the two games that you mentioned or for other games?

Regards


Have a look here for the drivers for your PC

 

[BigCTM]

Yes - I have done the basics like updating drivers and the BIOS. I have installed the latest Realtek ones and the latest Creative ones. Since the same issue occurs with both, I tend to think that the issue is not the cards or the drivers. The question I keep asking myself is why does a reboot solve the issue. Whenever I boot up and start playing the game immediately, the issue does not occur. If I surf the web and do other things then play, the issue occurs almost every time.

It happens on all the games I have tried (all RPGs like Fallout, Oblivion, Dragon Age, Titan Quest, etc).

Hi
Welcome to Seven Forums

Have you tried updating the drivers (newer BIOS if available on the support page) for your PC?

Regards

 

[Lomai]

Hi

Try updating your DirectX Files - download

Regards

 

[Lomai]

The question I keep asking myself is why does a reboot solve the issue. Whenever I boot up and start playing the game immediately, the issue does not occur. If I surf the web and do other things then play, the issue occurs almost every time.

Hi
Welcome to Seven Forums

Have you tried updating the drivers (newer BIOS if available on the support page) for your PC?

Regards

It could be something that is loading after start-up that is causing the lockup. :huh:

 

[Lomai]

Are you comfortable in digging into msconfig?

 

[BigCTM]

Sure - I use it regularly.

Are you comfortable in digging into msconfig?

 

[astonius]

Finally, someone who is having the exact same problem as me! I've had precisely the same issue you describe since day one of owning my G7710. A few minutes into playing any game the audio gets choppy, then a few minutes later it locks up, the audio stutters, and a BSOD stating that "a clock interval was not received on a secondary processor within the allocated time interval" appears. Then after the memory dump/restart everything works fine. I have submitted a request to Acer to have this investigated, but I wanted to see if you were ever able to find a solution.

 

[BigCTM]

I have not found a solution yet. I honestly thought about contacting Acer but never did. I can live with it. I am just in the habit of rebooting every time I play a game and I do not have any issues.

Besides this, the G7710 has been great, especially at the price I paid back when Tiger Direct was clearing them out.

If you hear anything worthwhile from Acer, let me know. Maybe I should put in a support request also.

 

[astonius]

That's how I got mine too! Great deal, IMO. Some people were saying it was a dated machine, but you couldn't build your own machine that was water-cooled and had the expansion options for the price of the G7710. I will post on here if I find out anything.

 

[BigCTM]

I went ahead and put in a support ticket with Acer. Maybe we can get answer to this one. I am usually pretty good with solving PC issues but this one has me stumped and I have spent way too much time trying to figure it out.

 

[astonius]

Update: Acer has been super helpful /sarcasm

In all seriousness, I think I may have corrected the problem. I did everything I could think of: Windows Updates, driver updates, virus scans, stress tests, spybot scans, scan disk (full with error correction), and finally reset the BIOS to default factory settings. So far I haven't gotten a BSOD. It has been two days, whereas normally I could start the machine, play 10 minutes of Starcraft II and be restarting. Today from a fresh boot I played Starcraft II for 3 hours straight without any issues.

Hope this helps.

 

[BigCTM]

Yeah Acer's tech support is a total joke. They must believe that everyone is a complete idiot and knows nothing about computers. Their responses are about as generic as they get.

I upgraded the BIOS to A04 (the latest one I think) and reset to factory defaults and have not had any issues gaming for long periods either. I still always reboot before playing. I guess it's habit at this point.

 

[jeffdelamotte]

Freezing and rebooting Predator

Hello,

I have a Predator since a bit more than a year and I'm using it for online flight simulation mostly.

Recently I bought Silent hunter and did had the same problem you were describing.

So if I understand well the only thing you do other than update all driver to the latest is to change your BIOS to the latest version.

Since I started to have the same problem, my computer also reboot almost at every startup ( Normal startup, window logon, desktop and suddentlyblue screen and memory dump ) then I get an overcloking error message on the next startup opening the Startup option screen.

Of course I did use the " reset factory default ", saved and exit but this is still happening.

I'm intended to think that the 2 are related as before it started the sound cruching thing and rebooting, my PC was simply working great.

Let me know if you had any other fix since your last post.

Thanks

Jeff