cdyson37

Okay fine, reinstall all the drivers again. I should stress that this machine worked fine when I built it - its a year old now and its only the soundcard that made things start going wrong.

New stuff! I downloaded AIDA32 and looked at the directX sound page - it lists all the buffers that dx can use - is it normal that they should all be 0 (0 there, 0 used)? Also, my card appears twice - I've got Primary Sound Driver, and SB Audigy Audio [9000] (emulated)? Is this normal? Are my drivers dodgy? Why did this have to happen to me??? Thanks all, Charlie.

quote:Originally posted by Fiver: The moment you described sound card problems I thought: is this guy running an AMD? And behold! He is! So then I wondered if his power supply was 250w? Bear with me because if it is, you may seriously want to bump that sucker up to 400. I have an AMD sitting on my shelf that I spent good money on several sound cards for with that EXACT same problem. Power supplies = the most tempting place to skimp when constructing your home system. If that checks out let's talk about your cooling situation and ambient conditions around your PC. I thought it was normal too. I did check these levels when I first built the thing. So where does that leave me? I still have to turn down the acceleration on some games (I suppose I can live with that). Anything else I can do?

For your delight and amazement I now have some voltage, temperature and fan speed readings! I know this is boring but I'd like to know if any of you informed people think any of these is a bit off: CPU1 1.74V +3.3V 3.31V +5V 4.89V +12V 11.96V DDR(2.5) 2.46V AGP(1.5) 1.47V Chassis 36C CPU 46C Case fan 3100RPM (don't know the speed of the other one) CPU FAN 4300RPM These readings were taken after prolonged use. One or two of these appear to be slightly below their defined values - do you think these are low enough to cause problems? Thanks again, Charlie.

I do know how to check voltages etc, what I'm wondering is if anyone knows the exact ranges for valid operation of PCI cards etc (how much can a given voltage drift, for example before things start to go wrong). My m/board came with a very poor h/w monitor that only gives temp and a couple of other things and I can't get h/w monitoring working on linux at the moment.

Okay, my PSU is 350W - does anyone have any idea how I could tell if its overloaded (any particular voltages to look at in the bios screen or windows h/w monitor), or any suggestions about the max. amount of heat I should tolerate inside the case. I ought to point out that I have two powerful, temp. controlled fans inside there, and a PSU with two separate fans, so I never thought heat would be a problem when I bought it. Thanks again, Charlie,

Leaving soon, but yes it is a certified AMD PSU, and I assumed that it was suitable when I bought it!

Er, I think I have a pretty good psu (enermax, 350W I think), and I forked out for two extra fans to pump air past my graphics card and CPU so it shouldn't be too bad. But I'll install the temperature monitoring stuff to check after say 1hr of usage. I'm going on holiday tomorrow, so I won't be to until I get back. Don't forget about me! I actually had problems before (here we go again): Bought board with onboard s/card. Works fine on linux. Sounds great on windows and linux. Drivers crash windows continually. Board maker doesn't release new drivers. Get very annoyed. Buy cheap creative card on trip to Hong Kong. Card often produces static and sometimes makes system run very slowly. Get annoyed again, fork out for expensive audigy 2 card. Problems (see above post) I'll check out the heat and circulation thing when I get back - thanks for the suggestion. Do AMD chips draw more power/generate more heat than intel then? Thanks again, Charlie.

Yup got the latest drivers. The game still ran a little slowly at -x0 so I'll try the slider. Thanks.

Thanks, I'll try those options and use the highest -x that works. Any idea why my card should act like this (kinda annoying, given the expense of a creative card)?

Okay, I've got windows working on a very old 6gb hard drive and I've worked out what the original problem was: sound. If I switch off sfx and music the game runs smoothly, but if I switch them on it's unplayable. This is probably not a problem with the game itself, because Tribes 2 is just like that if I use creative EAX or directsound, but its own 2d audio thing works fine. I tried setting my speaker settings to 2.1 speakers, but that didn't work. I thought that it might be that my CPU couldn't cope with positional audio on top of everything else but that seems to have been disproved by changing the speaker options, or that it still "thought" in terms of 3d sound before sending it to the speakers. Either way, is there any way of switching off any 3d audio settings from within the game, or does anybody know about this particular problem and my sound card (and how to fix it)? Thanks again, Charlie

Thanks all. After all that, I've not been able to install BCMG, because my hard drive just crashed. I'm just trying to restore any recent data from my linux partition (wonder why I use linux for all non-game stuff: read the posts above!), then I'll send it back (it's still under warranty). I'll get back to these boards when I get a new HD back, assuming that nothing else breaks between now and then. Thanks again. I suppose this thread is closed. The dancing bannana was inspirational, by the way.

quote:Originally posted by GhengisX: strive to eliminate all questionable indications and warnings in device manager. Yup, my pocket money comes from re-installing other people's machines, and that's what I do. But when it comes to my machine I'm usually too lasy (have you ever been to an electrician's house: don't touch the light switches). That said, I've installed the drivers (the creative guy said that was a good idea too) and it works! DirectX tests work fine. Cue dancing bannana I'll reinstall BCMG when I get a chance - what was the FAQ the supreme-commander-guy was talking about, I couldn't find a link? Once again, many thanks, this has been exceptionally helpful and I owe you people big time.

Usually I install the nvidia drivers straight from their site (because it's always worked before), and don't bother with the chipset drivers (because they don't appear to do anything, except remove a few warning symbols in the devices tab), but I might as well give it a go. I'm still pretty certain that this is a compatability thing, and I'll use creative's text chat support thingy to try and sort it out this afternoon. Thanks again for your support.

Thanks for your support. This seems to be an unrelated thing to the original problem. I've re-installed win98se, installed my graphics drives (from the nvidia site) and then installed DirectX9b (or was it c - the latest version anyway), downloaded from microsoft.com. Anyway, same problem, nothing that uses Direct 3D will run, and I get this error message if I test d3d with dxdiag: Test failed at step 8 (Creating 3D Device); HRESULT = 0x80004005 (Generic failure). I've tried installing the Creative drivers (based on the nvidia ones), but I get the same message. I assume that the issue is the nvidia/creative drivers being incompatable with the latest d3d. So, any ideas on how to resolve this, bearing in mind that directx setups don't seem to allow you to install a previous version on top of a current one? Thanks for all your support. I am particularly grateful because this isn't really a BCMG issue any more (though it might be again if I ever get this fixed!)