Peculiar Sound Problem - problem now solved

[George Powell]

I have recently bought a Logitech G35 headset and have encountered a rather odd problem.

During normal windows activity, using iTunes, Spotify, Total Media Theatre it works perfectly and produces clear undistorted sound.

As soon as I start gaming, I'm a WoW addict so mostly that the sound becomes all choppy and also causes the game to stutter. If I drop the resolution down to ugly levels the effect is diminished although not entirely.

I have quite a complicated setup as I use the computer as a media server as well as my desktop, although it's never having to stream video while I am gaming.

My previous setup for a headset used an X-fi soundcard and a regular headset rather than a USB one.

If I defocus the game ie alt tab out it the sound returns to being its normal crisp self.

The basis of my current setup is as follows.
i7 860
8GB ram
Radeon 5850
Onboard sound disabled in bios and x-fi removed.
I use Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit.

I am using the most current drivers supplied by windows update with the exception of my logitech kit. G19, G35 and MX revolution which all have their own software installed. And the Radeon which has the catalyst 10.10 drivers installed.

I normally game at 2560x1600, which in WoW allows for the Ultra settings. I am not currently using the DX11 option.

This is on a clean installation of windows.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Gunbuster]

Sounds like a DPC latency issue. Use this tester: http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

Run that and start updating drivers. Audio, NIC, Wireless, Video, and BIOS are the usual suspects.

 

[George Powell]

Thanks for that, I'll look into it. Just reading the details on that page are quite interesting. I'm rather inclined to believe it's a network card issue at the moment. I'll keep you posted.

George

 

[George Powell]

Problem sorted....in manner of sorts.

Turned out that the onboard PCI network adapter is at fault, driver changes didn't sort it but changing the speed of the adapter down from 1000Mbit to 100Mbit worked a treat.
Prior to that it was red bars off the scale, now it green all the way

 

[RebateMonger]

Manually setting the speed of a NIC is often a cause of poor network performance. In almost every case, NIC speed should be left on "auto-negotiate".

 

[George Powell]

The adapter was originally set to auto negotiate and would connect at 1Gbps. This caused the quite pronounced audio and slowdown issues. When the connected speed was manually reduced to 100Mbps all the issues were removed.
This also only occurs with the PCI based NIC on the motherboard and not with the PCIe one. The only snag with this is I have a whole separate issue with the PCIe based NIC.