K8T Neo2 Crackling sound after updating BIOS to 9.3

Question

Yet another problem since upgrading my comp with an X2 4200+ and flashing the BIOS to 9.3.  I am now getting problems with crackling sound with my PCI Creative SoundBlaster Live Platinum 5.1 (yes I know its old but it works fine, or it did!).  With my old Athlon 3200+ Winchester and the 3.2 BIOS the sound card was working fine. The crackling seems to be linked to disk activity.  with no disk activity e.g watching live TV, no crackling.  With moderate disk activity e.g playing mp3 or video file etc, slight crackling.  Heavy disk activity e.g running disk search or starting a game etc, severe crackling.  This is repeatable every time so for example you can have live TV on with no sound problems then start a disk search and the crackling starts immediately.  There is no sign of any IRQ conflicts.  Have tried setting PCI latency in BIOS to 32 from default of 64, this had no effect.  A web search shows this was a common problem with this sound card and some earlier VIA motherboards.  Even vaguely recall the same problem myself with an old socket 7 board, but can't remember what I did about it.  Could try swapping PCI slots, but web searching suggest that rarely works for this problem and quite frankly after weeks of messing about I'm fed up of messing about with the computer.  Will report this one to MSI as well. 

Answer 1

Sounds like there are few different issues here.  By the look of things there are potential problems with the on-board sound, so I'll keep that in reserve for the time being.  On the other hand there are two of us here with crackling problems from Creative SBLive based cards, which may or may not be Hard drive related.  In my case I have two Samsung HD's which have worked with the SBLive without problem up until the BIOS/CPU change.  Therfore I've come up with a few possibilities which I will work through one at a time. 
1.  The new BIOS (9.x) has issues with the SBLive, possibly due to Latency issues.  I'm going to have a play around with some 3rd party software to try and see what the latency seeting are for various divices.  One reported fix I've seen is lowering the AGP latency??
2.  The sound card drivers are not installed correctly.  I've done this a few times. but have to admit getting the SBLive to work properly under XP has always been problematic, so may try this again.
3.  The OS is not installed correctly.  I'm very suspicious of the OS since the BIOS/CPU upgrade, since I've had a few different problems.  May try a fresh install on a different hard drive.  That way I can see if it effects any of my issues and if it doesn't help can go back to my exsisting install easily.
4  APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller and NOT ACPI) This is my prime suspect at the moment.  Correct me if I'm wrong but I didn't notice a setting for enabling APIC in the 3.2 BIOS and presume that it wasn't supported in that BIOS??  However it is enabled by default in the 9.x BIOS's,  I was very surprised after installing the 9.3 BIOS and X2 CPU for the first time that on start up the OS not only detected new hardware for the CPU but for everything else as well, video, sound card, IDE controllers etc etc.  I'm now suspicious that this was due to starting up with APIC enabled which reassigned all the IRQ's for the hardware.  Conventional wisdom seems to suggest that you cannot switch APIC on or off in BIOS without re-installing the OS?  I'll try the investigate this one with the OS reinstall mentioned above, but must admit admit to being very uncertain about the effects of this mode and the pros and cons of having enabled/disabled.  Can anyone shed any light on this issue before I start experimenting.