Crackles and pops after running a hardware monitoring p

Aphelion said:

And after you quit DPC latency checker do the red bars persist?

You mean after I quit CPU-Z? Yes, they do although it seems like there are not as many after quitting. But the audio dropouts are still there, even if they don't get "represented" by red bars. Only a restart or sleep->wake fixes them.

edit: also, there's a red bar almost every time I open a program, but it doesn't seem to affect audio the same way as CPU-Z does.

Aphelion said:

One thing you can do that would help everyone is post your specs.

MB is Asrock ALiveNF6G-VSTA, the CPU is an Athlon 64 4000+ X2 (65nm). 2GB of 667 DDR2 RAM. GPU is a 5450 now, but I tried with the onboard as well and it's the same. (Onboard is disabled now.) I also have a USB Wlan adapter, which I tried unplugging, but it didn't help (also, when there's some internet traffic the latency goes up a bit, but it doesn't affect the audio). One PATA HDD, one SATA DVD.

BIOS is updated to the latest version. (And it was the same with an older version.)

eyo said:

Aphelion said:

And after you quit DPC latency checker do the red bars persist?

You mean after I quit CPU-Z?
<snip>
BIOS is updated to the latest version. (And it was the same with an older version.)

Yes, after you quit CPU-Z.

Well, hmmmm... there, been so many crackle & pop threads with a wide variety of fixes that it's hard to pinpoint a single cause.

You're using the latest system/motherboard drivers (inf config files)?

Next thing to try is disabling the USB wlan adapter then reboot, and try again.

Also take a look at background processes/services. Shut down any ATI background
processes and stop and ATI services.

Ap

I confirm the same problem. I was misled initially since I noticed this only after overclocking, and was also venturing this thread here: Realtek, Windows 7 64RTM Crackle/static/popping

But then I found this happens with no over clocking, and starts everytime CPU-Z is run, remains even if CPU-Z is closed, until next restart. I also confirm that DPC Latency Checker correlates with the crackling.

Also I have checked that it is not due to overclocking - even when overclocked the system is fine till when I run CPU-Z.

So I have the exact same problem.

Oh, cool, at least I'm not alone..

What motherboard do you use?

I suspect there are many more people who are potentially affected by this, but they either don't use these programs (CPU-Z etc.) or they don't know that this is what's causing it.


I should repeat that this happened with 3 different soundcards and two different drivers on my PC. So in terms of hardware I would only link this to the motherboard.

I also tried various settings in the BIOS and it didn't seem to do anything. In fact I have AMD's Cool'n' quiet enabled now without issues (until I run one of those programs, of course).

You are right, most people have not seen it or not correlated with CPU-Z. Btw I tried CPUInfo, and it doesn't start the issue - probably because it may not probe the motherboard(?)

I use Gigabyte GA-M61SME-S2 with the Realtek onboard sound card. You can find the rest of my specifications when you click "My System Specs" below my nick on the left of this post.

Which specs do you use? Do you see anything common?

I'm using the Asrock ALiveNF6G-VSTA. Compared to your Gigabyte GA-M61SME-S2, it's very similar. The same 6100 integrated graphics and nForce 4xx chipset.

We also have the same A64 X2 4000+ CPU, but I'd say the motherboard chipset is the main cause.

BTW, I'm not using neither the integrated graphics, nor the integrated soundcard, it doesn't seem to make a difference for this particular problem.


Another thing, more offtopic: do you also have weak USB power on the motherboard? Like, trouble with long USB cables, trouble recognizing USB flash drivers or slow transfers?
I do, and I was wondering if it's related to the main chipset or is it a separate issue.

Regarding the USB, there are 8 USB ports in total, out of which I think I managed to fry 4 when I was using a bad PSU for a long time without knowing it. The remaining four give no problem however. I sometimes use an USB cable + a controller with its cable, total length being about 2m and still I saw no issues.

Hi all!

Acer 7520G laptop, 4Gb 6400 RAM, Windows 7 SP1 x64.
Same problems with pops and crackles after CPU-Z or HWMonitor running.
After AIDA64 everything is fine.

Maybe it's too late but i have found the solution,you're all running cpu-s with uneven multiplier,like 4000+ 10.5x or in my case athlon tk-53 8.5x and that causes issues with memory speed and ram:fsb ratio.
When multi on my cpu was 8x than ram was running at 666mhz but when it goes up to 8.5x memory drops down to 566mhz and during hardware monitoring cpu-z and hwmonitor cant detect real value and creates some kind of conflict.
Anyway i swapped tk-53 with tl-60 (multi 10x) and everything is perfect,no more sound cracling and popping when run cpu-z or whatever.
Now ram speed is always at 667mhz when testing,and in WEI scores 6.9 (5.9 earlier with tk-53).
Just to mention i have notebook msi gx610.