Hi there,

A friend of mine who I owe some big computer related favours has run into a problem with his sound after upgrading his motherboard to a nice new nForce beastie...

When playing games his sound has started to stutter completely and bog down the system, he loses a whole load of frames per second, and well, with garbled sound the game is hardly enjoyable. I got him to test some things in Windows to help you out.. if he uses Winamp with it's default settings music will stutter very occasionally.. so I got him to turn the 3 buffer settings in out_ds.dll to 0ms (winamp 2.8) and he found that music would stutter heavily just on minimizing and maximizing a window..

Before replacing the motherboard, he had no problems at all with the sound, and there are no conflicts with IRQ's at all with the new setup..


His new motherboard is a MSI K7N2, and his card is a SB Live 1024 Value. First he was using the latest drivers from Creative's website, and then a 'more suitable' set found by Windows Update, "5.0.2184.1" dated 18/11/99.


Has anyone seen a similar conflict, are there any drivers that could fix it, or other steps that could be taken? Any help would be greatly appreciated

has he tried the onboard nforce sound? I'd give that a try; its probably at least as good as the live anyway.

or possibly he needs to just disable nforce sound in the bios? just a guess.

Has he tried kX drivers?

When testing using winamp and moving windows, ensure that hardware graphic acceleration is enabled. If it ain't, then microsoft's software routines will be used instead of nforce, for bitblt's, thus loading the memory bus to a crawl.

those drivers from 1999 for the sblive are ancient. This:
http://files.asia.creative.com/LiveDrv/eng...i-Pack(ENG).exe
is a link to the latest driver set from february this year. Thats assuming he uses win 2k or xp. If he doesn't, there are still going to be newer drivers available. Get them here:
http://asia.creative.com/support/drivers/
This should help a lot. The sblive drivers are notoriously buggy. Although tbh in his situation i would probably ditch the sblive and use the nforce sound. I plan to do this myself in a couple of months...
Edit:
as always in these situations its probably a good idea to check if there are some new motherboard drivers/bios updates avaible also, given the motherboard seems to be what has trigerred the problem.

Thankyou all for the help so far

He has a 4 speaker setup and the rear speakers refuse to produce any sound using the nforce onboard so it's a case of fix the sblive or buy a new card.

I'll get him to check out the newer kX or Creative drivers... I had forgotten about the kX ones completely as I'm stuck using my AC97 chip atm I'm almost certain he has the latest mobo drivers and hardware graphics enabled, he's a gaming nut so I'd be surprised if he hadn't got all his graphics acceleration on full