Realtek, Windows 7 64RTM Crackle/static/popping

Yeah, with all these problems...it seems your doing the right things, the only other idea I have is disabling the on board LAN or LAN card because it will go out and ping the network every so often, I don't mean to just unplug it but to actually disable it in device manager, it's weird it's doing it under a couple different operating systems!!! And yes I'm a perfectionist with Video and sound quality working with HDMI and Dolby 5.1 Video and Audio and then you have stupid popping going on in the background!!!! It drove me freakin' Nutz!!!! But it all happen when I switched to Windows 7 either 32 bit or 64 and then I found the problem was the wireless Linksys Network Card...but I yanked that card and running on just LAN now and watching movies and listening to music just fine now...Sorry was hoping I could give you some help!!! My guess would be something in the Motherboard or you got something pinging the net!!! Maybe even a cookie type virus? It's like ET wanting to call home...as I said, to run that video card you must have one hell of a system!!! What Acer model is it anyway...would Love to study the motherboard in it and find out reviews and what processor are you running on that thing? One other thing, I think you said you disabled that NVIDIA card, but have you tried just removing it out of the system and running on the onboard graphics in windows? That card is designed even being disabled with you still plugged into it that your going to get graphics out of it...it has it's own processor built into it and I'm wondering if it could still be hogging up the bus?

Here's the specs from newegg Newegg.com - Acer Aspire AM3802-U9062 Core 2 Quad Q8300(2.50GHz) 8GB DDR2 1TB NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit - Desktop PCs

A guy on tiger direct did a review and said he returned it twice and got two new computers(don't know how 'cause acer won't let me do that). Anyway he says the sound is crap on both. Then on a cnet user review a guy said the gt220 graphics card is not compatible with windows 7. Personally I don't think it has anything to do with the setup, I think I just got a rotten tomato. I don't really feel comfortable taking out the card. I've replaced a cpu fan and modem before but that was on a cheap emachine ten years ago. It did not go too smoothly. The card would not slip into the slot easily like I thought and I had to litterally grab on to it hard and touch all the stuff on the card to get it in. It worked after that but for two years it was making loud whistling sounds. Besides, Acer does not want me messing in there or they would find an excuse to void my warranty.

Tell you what I'm going to do. I'm just going to read a well thought out letter to every acer rep I talk to if they let me talk. I already got one written out. It is worth a shot I guess. I have no confidence in their repair center. Basically it's a letter pleading for them to send me a refurbished computer even if it's a cheap emachine.

Yeah, I understand What a pain it is to get that card in and out!!! It's a very long card and the fan setup on it makes it a major pain to release the catch that holds the PCI-E clip that holds that card into that slot!!!
Well, I have a couple of problems with the review you sent me on that system!!! It's that guy Mike first of all who says: "I've been using this computer for 2 weeks now and overall it's pretty solid, but several little problems and headaches have prevented a better score. Mainly, the CD/DVD drive has given me issues. It causes freezing in certain programs and has been operating slowly or sporadically in others. Because of this I have to send it back to Acer for repair; they won't just send me a new drive. Their version of Windows 7 comes preinstalled with a ton of bloatware that took almost an hour to remove. The power supply is barely enough to power the components included, let alone future expansions." Personally, (It may not be your CD/DVD drive on this one Mike!!!), but for poor Mike...yes I can understand a little more about this system!!!
The "slowly and sporadically problem is being caused by at least 3 different things!!! One he mentions is: preinstalled with a ton of bloatware, okay Mike you got rid of the extra junk that I told you about (AaronDude) (Good Job Mike!!!) But here is a VERY BIG BUTT on this system!!! It only has a 300W Power Supply?!!!! I'm sorry but WTF!!!
Your running a Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300(2.5GHz) Newegg.com - Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 Yorkfield 2.5GHz 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor - Processors - Desktops Thermal Design Power 95W!!! Now lets take a look at that Graphics Card!!!! Power Trip Pay close Attention to these words!!! Maximum Graphics Card Power (W)58W, Minimum System Power Requirement (W)300W!!! On my box from the factory on that card, it said 300W min. too, but, 750 Watt power supply was Recommended!!! With everything I had on my system at the time, I blew my 450 Watt power supply 2 days after installing that card!!!
Okay, I'm not really going to sit here and try to do the math for Acer...But you have a system with at least, I'm sure, one case fan...if maybe not 2 would be nice...you're running a DVD drive (Hummm how many Watt's are we talking here?) Now lets throw in that 1TB SATA 5400RPM (How many more Watts there? Let's thank God they didn't put a 7200RPM in there!!!) A motherboard that I have no interest in even trying to take a look at at this moment, BUT how many Watts there?!!! Not sure if you have ever put your hand on a hard drive after it gets done pumping data to a CPU, but lets just call that very warm which = WATTS!!! Maybe not much but it's still pulling it!!! I'm sure they didn't go "Green" with this hard drive!!!
Come on Acer!!! What the heck kind of system are we putting together here?!!! I Build systems for a living!!! I might be a little crazy, but I think of the customer first and put them in a NICE 750-950 Watt power supply so they can have all the add-on's they want in the future such as Blue Ray? Or even a second Burner? Maybe another Hard Drive? I'm guessing that motherboard takes at least a good 40-60 Watts of power for LAN, Sound, and on-board Graphics...not to forget about the Gigs of RAM they got on it too!!!
Your running a Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300(2.5GHz) with a (4MB L2 cache, 2.50GHz, 1333MHz FSB) but why the hell did Acer put in DDR2 Memory that runs at a bus speed of 800mhz? You should be running DDR3 like they do with their new system AX3810-U1802 Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium , 64-bit version, Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q8300 (4MB L2 cache, 2.50GHz, 1333MHz FSB), 6GB (2/2/2/0) DDR3 SDRAM, 1TB SATA hard drive, Super-Multi drive, multi-in-one card reader, Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X4500, gigabit LAN, V.92 modem...Oh did you make a mistake with the Acer Aspire AM3802-U9062? And with your new and Improved AX3810-U1802, what the hell is the deal with the 220 Watt power supply?!!! Oh well, wait a second...they didn't drop in the big beefy NVIDIA GeForce GT 220!!! Their running with on-board graphics!!! Good for them!!! I bet they got a PCI-E slot on it!!! OOOP's just looked at the specs and guess what people?!!! They sure do!!! Let's drop that NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 in this system and see how fast we can flame a power supply up?!!!
I'm sorry, but I say if a company is going to build a system for the people that want it to last them the next 2-10 years of their lives...let's at least do it right!!!

Last time I put a 220W power supply in something that size was when a Pentium 2 was "State of the art!!!!"

There you go people!!! More Crap on the market from Acer!!!!

AaronDude, sorry to hear about your problems here but now I got a little more understanding of it all!!! It seems Acer wants to be in a really close competition with that other Junk E-Machine on the market!!! Their slowing your bus speed down by using the DDR2, which is making that nice GeForce card of yours dog like I told you it did on my system when I first put it in!!! No wonder you got spikes!!! Hell your running a system that has a bus speed of 1333mhz at 800mhz because of stupid companies and I haven't even looked to see if you can drop DDR3 in it!!! The other slow down is running a hard drive that puts out data at a slower rate 5400RPM just doesn't do it for me...I better be able to pump data at least at 7200RPM (MAJOR DIFFERENCE)...but that still doesn't really solve the sound issue at hand, but I'll give you the one and exact idea of what it is (and I know you don't want to hear it!!!) It's that GeForce card!!! That Baby wants to run!!! And it don't want NO 800mhz Bus!!! There's where your spikes are coming from!!! That Card is a Greyhound locked up in a 4 foot by 4 foot pen 24/7!!! Hate to say this, but it doesn't look good on being able to upgrade to DDR3 on that motherboard...I still don't know what it is...but I got 2 options for ya. 1) Replace that Motherboard and drop 4-6 gigs of DDR3 on it depending on what you want to do with the system as far as gaming or whatever or pull that GeForce 220 out (save it for another day) and put in a Geforce 9800GT and I recommend the PNY Brand with 512MB of GDDR3 Ram Amazon.com: PNY XLR8 9800 GT EE 512MB PCI-Express 2.0 DVI + DVI Graphics Card VCG98GT5EEXEB: Electronics Don't go with the 1024MB, there is problems sometimes with those cards because of the large RAM...and then the other upgrade you would HAVE to do changing that card out would be putting in a bigger power supply!!! At Least a 750W.
Sorry to be the barer of the bad news but company's just don't give a crap or have the intelligence or should I say...they just want to keep it cheap and maybe you wont notice...but I bet that system just dogs right out and will stutter if you put a game such as the new Predator Vs Alien or even METRO 2033 on it because of that damn bus speed and then you will still have the sound issue...which as that one guy told you it was maybe a matter of your timing being off...well buddy that's what I'm telling ya. Your Bus speed is all messed up with that fast processor and that fast video card running in a slow lane behind a bus going down the street and it stopping at every corner to drop someone off!!! No wonder your sound pops and skips and your system will all the sudden lag for a moment...it's getting bottle necked!!!

Mark

Well I sold it to my mommy and daddy for 200 bucks with the monitor before I read your post. I'm just relieved and happy just to get out of my site. Acer really POed me today. I was on the phone for a couple hours and everyone was just giving me the run around. They said there was nothing wrong with the computer the first three times it was sent in. I made a comment that their technicians don't know a thing to one of the guys I talked to and he was trying to tell me they don't make mistakes. He told me the warranty is for repair and not replacement. So that means I can't even get a freakin 200 dollar refurbished emachine from them. If your computer can't be repaired I guess you're just SOL. So long story short I'm through with that computer and I am just going to continue to use my old gateway laptop. Mommy and Daddy are sending it in again under my name, but it's now theirs. Heck, they might like it or be able to give it away to someone or something. I'll get a PS3 to play games, movies, music on. I'm sure sony will stand behind that if it breaks. In fact I hear they almost always send a refurb unlike acer. I guess that what happens when I put my trust into a crooked, low quality, Taiwan based company.

AaronDude, Yeah, May that system rest in piece!!! Or Should I Say....Pieces!!! Acer has ding bats working for them!!! I just CAN'T Believe the crap their trying to turn out!!! It's about as bad as Microsoft XBox 360!!! It's designed to go out!!! I have kids, and Microsoft says the 360 should only run at 4 hours at a time and be shut down for 8 hours...I'll tell ya...THAT'S A BUNCH OF BS!!! Try to tell that to a kid who's 15, 16, or 17 that has all his friends over, (for all night marathons), and try to tell those kids you can only play the X-Box for 4 hours and stay off of it for 8...oh well, let them Red Ring the thing!!! We are on our 4th XBOX 360 now because those things are designed to go bad!! Just one more example of "Big Company" vs "Little Person"!!!
If your parents could get that video card out of the system and run with the on-board graphics, it's a great system!!! Except for the couple of other little complaints I got about it...but they wouldn't have the bottle necking of Data backing up on the freeway and when the congestion does gets threw, would be those spikes you got every so often. And then everything settles for a bit and it surges again!!! Wish I could have helped you more...but all I can say is live and learn!!! ACER is crap or should I say has gone to crap!!! I Laughed my ass off on that other system they were selling!!! 220W Power Supply!!!! LOL What the heck kind of deal did they pick those up for? $.50 each?
You had a good system if you only knew the abilities of changing things out!!! Really it's not that hard...but being a builder of systems, hey I run into my problems too changing up to different motherboards or figuring out some of the simple problems that are right in front of your face!!! But that's to bad you got rid of that, you had some good parts there for a making of a really good system but it would have cost a few $$ more, and who expects to pay more money when you buy a system and expect it to run correctly from the day you get it? Computers have gone from $1000 for a complete system down to $300 for a complete system...you know somebody is cutting cost somewhere and then they have "professionals" LOL, who tell you, that you don't know what your talking about because "We Know It's CRAP" but were not going to tell you about it, for your information "from them" you have a excellent state of the art system and you don't know what you're talking about!!! The whole thing is perfectly fine and runs "Perfect" when we plug it into the wall!!! Now take it back and onto the next sucker... ooop's I mean "Customer."
Mark

Back on topic - specifically the Win7 & Audio driver / latency issues...

I've had some success with the popping & crackling issues with the wife's laptop. I previously tried all the different Realtek drivers with no dice (similar to others experiences) and went about disabling other hardware and checking the DPC Latency tool. As others have suggested the default MS audio drivers seemed better - I could almost remove the static by turning the quality down to 16bit 44MHz. I had a hunch that I was a little hasty in ruling out the Vista drivers (didn't uninstall the previous drivers properly), so I tried them again and was pretty stoked with the results.

The vista drivers experience no crackling, popping or DPC latency spikes except when streaming flash video through firefox in fullscreen (misc flash video players only, youtube is fine). As soon as the streaming video goes back to window the latency spikes stop. And this is only in Firefox, IE & Chrome don't experience the issue (I assume it is the way firefox handles flash video - fullscreen = 100% CPU on both 2.26GHz cores)

Games are a different story. Some are good, DoW2 Chaos Rising has all sorts of Audio issues causing sparodic lag - sometimes the game slows to a stuttery crawl, other times only the audio flips out. As this is my wifes laptop I don't game on it that often so have only really noticed the issue reappearing in the last few days as we have been away on holidays.


As far as I'm concerned the issue is 90% fixed for me. I note that others have tried Vista drivers (I'm using ver 6.0.1.5618) with no success where as others have similar success to me. I noticed an error in my system specs posted earlier and so have updated, I also threw an extra 2G of ram into the laptop (however the audio problem was *fixed* prior to this). The gaming PC with win7 Ultimate 64bit is using Realtek HD audio 7channel has never experienced an issue.

fredhoon said:

A few specs...

Sound Issues
Acer Aspire 6930G
Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit (no issues under Vista)
Realtek HD Sound (True5.1, Dolba, Tuba sub and all that crap)
Nvidia 9600M GT vidia, with nvidia HD audio over HDMI
Bluetooth Audio driver also installed.
Intel AGN Wireless
Atheros Gbit LAN

no issues
self built game PC
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
DFI Lanparty UT T3RS motherboard
Realtek HD 7ch on-board sound
2x Gbit LAN

Well my four year old laptop with intel graphics can actually run games better than that machine that is supposed to be a multimedia powerhouse. I'm not saying it runs them well though at all. It's a gateway I got for 300 bucks refurbished. I think it was about the time Acer purchased gateway but I'm not sure it is an Acer. If it was an Acer it probably wouldn't have lasted this long.

Anyway I found a PS3 yesterday at a target after searching for a couple weeks. They are really hard to find right now because of a shortage. It does what I need it to like play music from my external USB hard drive and all the other stuff. I got to buy a blu ray game and some blu ray movies since I haven't tried that out yet. I would still use my laptop to do a lot of things though like load the hard drive with music so I can play it on my PS3 and surf the web. It's not really a computer replacement but it compliments the computer I have nicely. Hey, it appears to be well made and appears to run well so far.

Even though I lost on that acer I'm actually relieved I don't have to worry about it any more. Well, I might give windows 7 a shot another time in maybe three years once this gateway don't work no more. I at least now know it wasn't a windows 7 issue or linux issue for that matter. I'm sure for computers that are actually made to work windows 7 would be a beautiful OS. I'm not saying I like microsoft though, they still got me on a 350 zune that never worked right. Their software may be ok in some ways but they just don't know what they're doing when it comes to hardware.

I recently dropped my DPC latency down to extremely low levels.

DPC Latency

One thing I can definitely recommend doing, update your BIOS.

I have an Acer laptop (WinXP_Pro) and a Gigabyte mainboard Desktop (Win_7) and I've managed to get them both down to around approx 50us with no spikes.

The laptop serves as a portable studio and runs a Presonus Firestudio, it has a separate hardware profile that's easy enough to boot into. The laptop had one small spike left after disabling wireless, Ethernet, internal modem... it turned out to be the "Microsoft Battery Control Method", since I only ran powered when recording I disabled that as well.

The Desktop was always decent but improved after flashing the BIOS, I'd also disabled some services and I'm still checking to see if they or the BIOS upgrade caused the improvement.

Ap

Hi,

I have same problem as all of you here. Crackling sound from time to time coming from the speakers.

The stunning thing I think is that I don't know yet wheter it's a software and hardware issue, ruling out one option would make it all much easier. I also wonder If We all experience the same issue, bit I doubt that as majority of people here have laptops 64-bit, I have desktop 32-bit and I have worked on it (with Win 7 installed) for over a year, then I had to reinstall OS (due to malicious software) and after that the problem occured. Only other thing I did beside reinstalling OS was changing slots of memory modules, so I thought It was something to do with them so I reverted to previous configuration, but I t didn't help. I also tested memory in Memtest86 under DOS, all seemed to be allright.

Concernign hardware.. I checked other speakers and the problem occured, I also installed temporarily Sound Blaster Audigy card without avail. Then I checked my speakers on 2nd desktop and they worked allright. I keep all the wires from each other in case interference is causing it.


The weirdest thing is that it happens randomly while I use foobar2000, Winamp or other media players, but I could play all day Dragon Age - Origins or other game (which I imagine eat up a lot of memory and CPU) and It never happens. I thought it might have been something to do with Windows Mixer so I installed WASAPI and Kernel streaming plugins in foobar2000, but nothing changed. It's just infuriating, I tackle with this problem for about two months I treid everything you guys posted here and all to no avail.

I post here a link to an image showing one of the memory modules which I though might be the culprit. It looks that It's slightly damaged but Memtest86 shows everything's allright. Please post your thoughts here, I know it's not hardware forum, but We'are trying to rule out every possibilty concerning the problem, don't We?

http://i42.tinypic.com/qrdcpc.jpg