RealTek AC97 ALC850 problems?

[scottydawg]

Anyone else having problems with this onboard chip?  It's an 8 channel Realtek chip (read: crap), and I've been getting hiccups/freezes on vox transmissions, and as of late it's been locking up my PC. I'm getting the latest drivers from RealTek now but was wondering if anyone had any insight.

Turning down the DX accelleration to the audio doesn't seem to have any effect.


TIA

[buzkill]

TRY VINYL DECK....IT WORKS GOOD FOR ME

[scottydawg]

Who shot who in the what now?

Seriously... what's vinyl deck?

[Clifra Jones]

Originally posted by scottydawg
Anyone else having problems with this onboard chip?  It's an 8 channel Realtek chip (read: crap), and I've been getting hiccups/freezes on vox transmissions, and as of late it's been locking up my PC. I'm getting the latest drivers from RealTek now but was wondering if anyone had any insight.

Turning down the DX accelleration to the audio doesn't seem to have any effect.


TIA

Not much you can do regarding this. The Ac97 specification robs processor Cycles from your CPU. This is what is causing your hickups.

There are several relatively inexpensive sound cards that work well with AH. I use a SP Live but Skuzzy says there are issues with it but I have not experienced any.

[scottydawg]

I knew the onboard audio sucks cpu, but I figured I had enough horsepower so it wouldn't make a diff (see sig)...  This AC97 also does the same lame crap all the others do with the static and the lockups.

I mean, why bother putting such a sucky sound chip on a decent motherboard?

Grr.

Thanks.

[London]

sp live! worx fine......i thinkits like a 20 dollar sound card..hell and it supports 5.1 surround. and you change the levels of your speakers and subwoofer.
way better than onboard jackin ur CPU

[OOZ662]

Onboard chips also don't have their own onboard memory like an expansion chip does, so they eat at the system RAM.

[Clifra Jones]

Originally posted by scottydawg
I knew the onboard audio sucks cpu, but I figured I had enough horsepower so it wouldn't make a diff (see sig)...  This AC97 also does the same lame crap all the others do with the static and the lockups.

I mean, why bother putting such a sucky sound chip on a decent motherboard?

Grr.

Thanks.

If all your doing is listening to music or watching a movie or playing most other games its fine. Thing is this game puts such a load on your system that anything that takes CPU cycles and ram away effects game performance.

[Clifra Jones]

Originally posted by London
sp live! worx fine......i thinkits like a 20 dollar sound card..hell and it supports 5.1 surround. and you change the levels of your speakers and subwoofer.
way better than onboard jackin ur CPU

So far I am more than happy with mine also.

[London]

Originally posted by Clifra Jones
If all your doing is listening to music or watching a movie or playing most other games its fine. Thing is this game puts such a load on your system that anything that takes CPU cycles and ram away effects game performance.

this game hardly puts a load on your system unless you are rollin with a crappy system. on a bad day this game takes 25% of my ram lol and maybe 10% of my CPU.

[scottydawg]

I beg to differ (see my specs below).  I think it's a combination of crappy driver coding and the fact that the audio chip parasites off the CPU for codec processing power... memory is not the issue but having onboard hardware making CPU calls and intterupts is definitely an issue. You'll find that the good sound cards have hardware AD/DA converters onboard, while the cheapies use software to encode and decode. THAT'S the difference.

[38ruk]

10% of my CPU.

If your Cpu isnt maxed at 99-100% , you have another issue you should be looking into.  System specs?

[London]

Originally posted by 38ruk
If your Cpu isnt maxed at 99-100% , you have another issue you should be looking into.  System specs?

ive got 2-7800gt (SLI)
pentium D 2.8GHz
2gigs DDR2 at 533MHz
creative Sound Blaster LIVE! 5.1