Hi,
this is my first post, so at first I would like to say hello to all forum members.
Recently a put together a system based on GA-X58A-UD5 Rev.2.
Last friday I received a new RME Babyface audiocard. As my future DAW software is not installed yet, wanted to test the sound in directsound playback in WMP. The install of the card is very simply. You download the newest drivers from RME, extract them somewhere in your computer and then you connect the card via USB to some stable powered USB slot. In device Manager you click Babyface on "update driver" and locate the extracted driver folder. Click ok, done. My card is installed corectly, but from the very beginning I noticed that the sound processing behaves bad. I put some wav or mp3 into the WMP, set Babyface as default output and the result?
Audio-dropouts, crackles and skiped audio frames or faster/slower playback (jus a little). Tried to play with the buffersize settings ( @48KHz: 48 - 2048 samples ) and sample rates. Higher buffer helped a little, but small crackles or audiodropouts occured from time to time.
I reinstalled the card at least 5times, tried different USB slot, did an driver upgrade for the NEC USB3.0 driver on the UD5. The audio issues were still there, so I asked at RME about the issue ( i thought its a soundcard issue ). They responded, that I have a driver/hardware problem in my computer and asked me to install the latest driver.
The issue continued when I tried to play video files with hd audio streams through well known MPC-HC player and set RME for audio playback. Before the purchase, I havent noticed the crackles or audio drop-outs, because somehow the integrated Realtek Audio chip on the Gigabyte board has hidden the DPC audio issues, which went on with the new RME Card. The crackles were immediate after starting the playback and they were not occasional. I tried to play with the buffer size in Babyface USB settings and there I have noticed USB transmission errors during playback.
http://postimage.org/image/hurcnjes/Then I started Latency checker and LatencyMon tools to check, if there is some communication problem on the USB port. With RME set as default audiocard, I started a playback in MPC-HC with a movie in it and then I started one of the monitoring tools:
http://postimage.org/image/hrmw3xtw/sometimes it looked like this
http://postimage.org/image/2q8frfdt0/When I uninstalled the RME card to check, if its the RME card which causes the spikes, Realtek on the board has been set as default device, but the issues were still present. In between, I tried to disable CPU powersafe features, Turbo Boost, used GPU clock tool and MSI Afterburner ( to set GPU to fixed frequencies ), but nothing helped:
http://postimage.org/image/2q9womhlw/To sum it up, huge DPC spikes has been notified by the LatencyMon at following drivers/sys files:
usbport.sys (USB controller or any driver which interfaces with USB)
portcls.sys (Audio port interface, so any driver which deals with sound or audio)
scsiport.sys (Anything listed under Storage Controllers or SCSI & RAID controllers in Device Manager)
ataport.sys (Anything listed under IDE/ATA ATAPI controllers in Device Manager)
hdaudiobus.sys (when using realtek audio chip )
Please take a notice, that Im using MPC-HC with madvr video renderer ( curently best of ). Using other renderers like EVR based, I couldnt reproduce these huge scsiport.sys spikes ( 2000-3999 ).
During playback with EVR rendrer, the scsiport.sys events were displayed as the highest in the Latencymon, but the DPC Count was under 500 and ISR under 250 ( execution time ).
EVR does not use DXVA, its passing everything to CPU. EVR-CP with DXVA based decoders offloads this work to the GPU processors. MadVR is different, its basically programmed like a D3D video game renderer - all work is done via GPU shaders, it does not support DXVA at all. MadVR outputs in YV12 color format only and its programmed to achieve the best results - with the costs of GPU load.
To confirm my assumption, that higher GPU load causes the red spikes in LatencyMon a did further testing with the video files and Babyface.I turned GPU-Z on and after testing I came to a conclusion, that there is a relation between GPU load and DPC spikes. EVR and EVR-CP generated approx. 0-14% GPU load. MadVR´s GPU load was between 35-43%.DPC spikes and GPU-Z looked like this:
EVR
http://postimage.org/image/2ehiayb6s/EVR-CP DXVA
http://postimage.org/image/2eh1rku90/madVR
http://postimage.org/image/2efurltes/What I try to say, is that the DPC latency issues rise with the GPU load. Im not skilled in this, but few things come off due to this:
- IRQ issue
- PCIe issue ( check my PCIe configuration - have 3 cards there )
- motherboard issue, chipset issue, bus communication
- GPU issue
-...
I dont believe RME has produced a faulty card with faulty driver. I disabled both audio audiocards ( Internal Realtek and Babyface ) and also ATI HDMI output card on my computer and then run the LatencyMon with madVR in MPC-HC:
madVR - no audio card
http://postimage.org/image/ausauv38/again same bad results on SCSIport.sys and ataport.sys
What I believe is that my system, better said, the way how my drives and PCIe cards are configured ( I have 3xPCIe cards ) behave maybe badly from the beginning. What should I do?-What kind of test do I need to do, to target the issue/cause? It is the motherboard, it is the PCIe OCZ Revodrive, it is the Perc H700 Raid Controller ( disabled - same results - tested ) or maybe the ATI 5670 card? Why does the DPC spikes show their face when RME USB card is turned on on its USB port - usbport.sys/portcls.sys ? Why does realtek getting same issues when this audio chip is on - hdaudiobus.sys?
Thanks for your opinion and please correct me if my questions are not in the right direction.
Pluto
My systemi7 980x
Win7 64bit
Gigabyte GA-X58a UD5 Rev. 2, BIOS FD (
updated a 2weeks ago via @BIOS - issue? ), the chipset driver is actual 9.1.2.1007
OCZ Revodrive (not x2), 50GB with the latest driver (for OS ) - PCIe ( card is basically a RAID controller in Raid0 )
DELL PCIe Perc H700 SAS/SATA Raid Controller with latest driver (Raid 10), using 4x WD RE4-GP 2TB
3x Samsung HD204UI
Pioneer BDR-205
Sapphire PCIe ATI Radeon HD5670 Ultimate - the issue has been tested with Catalyst 10.10e, 11.1, currently 11.1a
Seasonic Gold X-750
Fractal R3
Photos here
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=471339651826&set=a.471339546826.256461.171179716826