[SOLVED] Motherboard audio popping, looking for sound card.

sazrocks · September 5, 2017

So, my Z170-A motherboard audio is starting to pop for some reason, especially while gaming. So, I'm looking for a sound card. $75 is my preferred budget, but I can be convinced to go up to $100 if the card will last 5+ years. Any suggestions/guidelines for sound card shopping?

Would the SBZ work? The mic would be nice since my current one is absolute crap.

My current headphones are 26-ohms NC OFF and 150-ohms NC ON.

SageOfSpice · September 5, 2017

DPC latency is a likely culprit if it's aggravated under load. A sound card wouldn't fix it then, as it's an issue to do with the OS and the CPU.

sazrocks · September 5, 2017

1 minute ago, SageOfSpice said:

DPC latency

Ok that's a new term for me. What is it and how do I minimize it?

SageOfSpice · September 6, 2017

2 hours ago, sazrocks said:

Ok that's a new term for me. What is it and how do I minimize it?

It's usually the result of a driver, or program that isn't functioning properly. There are some fairly simple monitors you can use to check the latency, as well as determine the source of the issue. The one I typically use is called LatencyMon.

In short, you let the monitor run for a bit, and it'll give you an overview letting you know if it detects any problems. It has some tabs you can look through to get a glean of what is going on in the system. Excessive pagefaults, or driver execution time will result in these clicks and pops you hear while playing games, or watching movies. It's basically the system interrupting the audio playback in order to restart a driver, or recover from an error. What you'll want to do is find the driver responsible, and try reinstalling it. Decreasing this latency should resolve your issue.

sazrocks · January 17, 2018

I know this is necroing but I wanted to post the solution I found here in case anyone stumbles across this thread in the future.

I manually lowered the System Agent voltage in the BIOS to 1.075 and Voila no popping. This may only be applicable for my board (Asus Z170-A), but it's worth a shot if anyone else out there is having DPC issues that can't be fixed by drivers. Also for the record I am still running BIOS 3503 (3504 drops a feature I need to boot another OS on my system).