Brief lockups when sounds play on gaming laptop

[CookPassBabtridge]

SPECS: Medion Erazer X6813 Laptop with:
NVIDIA GTX460
Onboard sound - Realtek ALC892
4GB Memory
Intel i7-2630QM

Hi all

This is a problem I have always had with this gaming laptop (Medion Erazer X6813). Only in game, very often when a sound plays, the game will momentarily lock up. Examples are in XCOM EU when the commander or Dr Vahlen chime in over the action, or when you discover enemies and the sound plays. In FPS's it will often happen when you fire a gun or something explodes, and in games like Skyrim it could happen with lots of things e.g. walking over a dropped sword and making it go 'clang'. You get a lockup of half a second, and then on the game goes. Depending on the game you can ignore it, but with others its infuriating and leads to pointless deaths.

I have tried many things e.g. driver updates, motherboard replacement, turning the sound quality down to the lowest Hertz setting in the Realtek Audio Manager, editing ini files of games for the number of sound channels, turning off Turbo Boost on my CPU ... nothing seems to work. It does it with all games, of all ages, though to greater degrees with some games. If I disable onboard audio, the visual lockups disappear but of course there is then no sound. I do not really want to buy an external sound card.

Essentially I believe it has to do with the Realtek ALC 892 HD Audio, but the usual steps of uninstalling and reinstalling drivers makes no difference. Even the recent mobo replacement has not cured it.

Has anyone come acoss this and fixed it?

Cheers

SN

Oh FFS how typical. This hs been going on for 2 years, and just as I post this, I figure it out (I think).

I just disabled the entries for Optical sound output and NVIDIA HD Audio in the W7 sound device manager, leaving just the Realtek HD Audio / Speakers active. SEEMS to have solved the problem ... we will see if it lasts.

EDIT: Meh it seems to still be doing it, just maybe slightly less pronounced.

Just replying to myself in case anyone else has the same problem. The above solution did not work, and so just recently I downloaded a driver utility from a reputable site that identified a number of very out of date motherboard and chipset drivers. For some reason the Intel site did not have these drivers available, and the MEDION driver service only had the old ones. The utility downloaded them for me. These were the ones I updated:

Intel HM67 Express Chipset Family LPC Interface Controller
Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller
2nd Generation Intel Core Processor Family DRAM Controller
High Definition Audio Controller

Now I have updated them, the hitching problem has gone away even on the worst offending games (XCom).

[SHON]

Glad you got your problem fixed, reading thru your thread the first thing that came to mind was out of date chipset drivers.

[CookPassBabtridge]

Thanks Boomy. Its really weird that the Intel driver tool didn't pick them up though. I had updated the Realtek HD Audio drivers many times, but I guess if the interface from the other chips was not working it wouldnt have made a difference.

Anyways, hopefully this issue will stay fixed and I can have nice smooth gaming from now on :)

[blkmnky]

I just wanted to pitch Resplendence Software's Latency Monitor, I had horrible audio issues (flipping channels, clicking and popping and stalls whenever voices or sound effects initialized) and LatencyMon helped me to figure out that I needed to update my Motherboard and Chipset Drivers and that my Wireless PCI card was causing DPC latency so I had to remove it completely, it's drivers were incompatible with Windows 8. Really useful tool I wholeheartedly recommend it! I went through all the things you mentioned thinking I had fixed my audio issues but it wasn't until I used this tool that things actually got fixed.

http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

[CookPassBabtridge]

Hi I will try it thank you :)

Just to add, it looks like my problems have gone away for now, all except when I play World In Conflict. Its an old game for XP / Vista, and the choppiness comes back when audio plays. I will see if latencymon helps

Ehhh well I gave LatencyMon a try. Looks like it picked up some problems, but unfortunately it's suggestions are a bit woolly: Turn off any CPU throttling (I have Intel Speed Step and have tried turning it off before with no effect, same again this time), install a new BIOS (No luck finding a BIOS update for an Intel HM67 Mobile Motherboard, even on the Intel site) and finally, turn off WLAN (no difference). Its telling me that DirectX and my video driver (most up to date versions currently installed) are the items experiencing the greatest thingumy-wotsit times.

Sadly for me LatencyMon seems powerful in diagnosis, but rather weak in prescription :(

[blkmnky]

It's kind of a puzzle. Start LatencyMon then hit the green arrow at top, now run some games, watch videos, use internet just like you normally do for about an hour or so. The best way I could say to fig it out is Look at DPC and ISR count if these go into the red then you have issues. If so then hit stop, Go to Edit -> Copy report to clip board and right click and paste into a Wordpad or Notepad .txt file and upload that here.

[CookPassBabtridge]

hi blkmnky, cheers for the ongoing support. I did actually do all those things and picked through the report, applied the fixes etc, but none of it seemed to really help. I may play with it more to see if it suggests anything different, but it seemed to mostly keep saying the stuff mentioned above.

I am thinking about buying a GTX 780Ti powered desktop soon anyway so it may not matter soon :)

[mmmcheesywaffles]

Цитата допису SuperNashwan:

...and so just recently I downloaded a driver utility from a reputable site that identified a number of very out of date motherboard and chipset drivers. For some reason the Intel site did not have these drivers available, and the MEDION driver service only had the old ones. The utility downloaded them for me. These were the ones I updated:...

...
Now I have updated them, the hitching problem has gone away even on the worst offending games (XCom).

Apart from the upgraded drivers; installing them has menat you forced the mobo to reset resources such as IRQ. That may well have been your real problem. Two bits of hardware wantign to share teh same IRQ and hitting timing issues. Each time you loaded a sound file you will have triggered an IRQ request to provide teh sound and that IRQ was probably in high demand elsewhere in your system. Resetting can let teh BIOS set those resources to avoid such clashes.

[Supreme Toaster]

http://forum.cakewalk.com/Windows-7-amp-Core-Parking-a-better-way-to-Turn-It-OFF-m1861804.aspx Disable Core Parking.

This is a power saving feature in windows that haunts the gaming community. It limits and even disables cpu cores when not fully used. This creates performance issues and stutter.

Fixed my Amd 955 be.