Fix For Audio Stutter and Gigabyte EP35 DS3 Boards

[DarrellS]

I have been having problems with stuttering audio since purchasing the Gigabyte GA-EP35 DS3P in May. I updated the BIOS to F3n but that didn't help. I turned off onboard audio and installed an audio card but that didn't help.

Today, I stumbled upon a program called DPC Latency Checker and after visiting their forum, found that the Gigabyte boards had a bad latency problem as verified by my Latency test. I did some googling and found a thread on Tom's Hardware where users stated that the latest BIOS update fixed the problem so I downloaded and installed the update (F5) and it fixed the problem.

Here are my latency tests with the F3n BIOS and the F5 BIOS...

[DarrellS]

Guess not. Still getting machine gun fire sound. Doesn't do it as often as it was but it still does it. Very irritating. I've never had a PC that acts like this.

[sheehand]

I have been fighting this problem quite a bit too. I have a GA-EP335C-DS3R and it did the stuttering/audio freezing when I did certain tasks. For example every single time I maximized iTunes or minimized it the audio would routinely stutter (it would also do it consistently but briefly when I booted up at the same point every time). I.E. It was reproduceable so I knew it wasn't a hardware issue like power supply or overheating.
I have been updating everything I can think of, Intel chipset drivers from the Intel site, Intel RAID controller drivers/software, audio drivers, video drivers, etc.

In one of my random searches I found your post with a mention of the DPC Latency Checker. While I wasn't ready to upgrade to the latest beta BIOS just to see if it fixed my problem, I did go through using the tool. It confirmed what I suspected, and my latency would shoot up to over 16000 (roofed) in the program. So I went to the DPC Latency Checker website and started doing some troubleshooting because their tool reported a driver was misbehaving (something I noticed was missing on your screen shots).

While beating my head against the wall and turning off hardware components (network, audio, etc...) at their recommendation, I continued to do web searches. I then found this post:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=266264
Sure enough I had a SATA DVD burner in my machine. I disabled it in the device manager and presto iTunes started behaving perfectly. So then I went to find out why this made a difference.
It seems that Gigabyte posted a new driver about 1/2 a month ago for the onboard Gigabyte (seperate from the onboard Intel one) RAID controller:
http://www.gigabyte-usa.com/Support/Motherboard/Driver_Model.aspx?ProductID=2740
I am not sure I ever updated that as I was not using the Gigabyte SATA connectors for any type of RAID, just a single DVD drive - I mean if you aren't using something for a RAID then it doesn't need a RAID driver right?
On a whim I updated the driver as the one I had was from 2007 (not sure I ever updated it after I clean installed Windows XP SP3), re-enabled my DVD drive, and even after a reboot everything is still fine. I have yet to encounter a single audio stutter.

One thing to note is that my DPC Latency Checker now looks like your first post where I occasionally get a yellow, but the message remains the same that my computer should be able to handle real-time audio streaming w/o dropouts, and I haven't experienced one.

So I guess the morale of the story is don't assume that a driver you don't think you are using isn't being used, and that you don't need a driver update. I would recommend you go through your Gigabyte support link and make sure you are running the same version of all the drivers they have posted (or newer directly from the chip manufacturer) like I did, and maybe your problem will clean up too?

Good luck. I will post back if it comes back.

[DarrellS]

Thanks but that didn't help. Checked Device Manager and it says everything is working properly. If I try doing a lot of stuff at once then I'll get the message in DPC Latency Checker that a driver was misbehaving.

I can't go pulling my TV Tuner/capture card or switching video cards to try and get the board to act right. If I would've known that this board wasn't meant to be a multimedia board then I would've bought something else but with 8 SATA connectors, 10 USB, Firewire and e-SATA, it seemed like the best board for the money. I should've went with an MSI I guess or spent $200 for an Intel.

Guess I'll have to save up and get a new board and chalk this up as lesson learned. I was leery about getting a Gigabyte since my brother had problems with one three years ago but everyone here said Gigabyte was the board to get get nowadays.

[sheehand]

My device manager said everything was working correctly as well. A misbehaving driver doesn't mean that an item is showing up as broken. I.E. My DVD drive was showing up just fine. However obviously I needed to update my Gigabyte "RAID" driver because that was what my DVD SATA drive was plugged into (and the Gigabyte "SCSI" RAID controller wasn't showing up as broken either).

Go back to the DPC Latency Checker website. They have troubleshooting steps I followed which tells you turn off devices like your NIC and sound card one at a time to see if they are the culprit. If nothing else you can try turning off various pieces of hardware (obviously you can't turn off the video card) to see if any of them are directly or indirectly causing the problem (I consider my DVD drive to be indirectly causing the problem since it was actually the controller the DVD drive was plugged into that was the problem).

Also have you updated EVERY driver on your computer? I.E. Did you go to the Gigabyte link for your board (like the one I linked) and make sure you were running the latest version of every driver they posted?
If your board is the same as mine, you can go to Intel's website and get the motherboard chipset drivers for the series 4 chipset. I also use the full Windows Update to do hardware driver updates for my NIC.

So as of today I am running the Intel Storage Manager/RAID driver and the Gigabyte RAID driver from the Gigabyte website, the 2.0 audio driver from the Gigabyte webiste, the NIC driver update through Windows Update, the latest Intel motherboard chipset driver from Intel's website (again mine is series 4, and if we don't have the same motherboard then they have a chipset identifyer utility), and the latest video card driver from Nvidia.

If you have tried all of this, then I apologize for not having anythign futher to contribute.

[DarrellS]

Picked up a nasty virus last week that caused me to reinstall Windows and after reinstalling everything, my audio problems seem to have disappeared.