Adjusting PCI Latency?

D

Dario D.

Gawd
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Dec 8, 2004
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I read somewhere that the only way to fix the issue with X-Fi sound cards crackling on some motherboards is to tinker with the PCI latency of the video and sound cards (basically reduce the video card's latency a bit, using numbers that are powers of 8). I just spent upwards of 6 hours straight today doing war with my X-Fi which at first didn't want to install properly, but finally gave in after I told it what I would do if it didn't comply.

Anyone know anything about this PCI latency stuff, and how safe it is to mess with? (and if it makes a difference if you have 2 PCI Express video cards on an SLI board, but aren't using SLI, because you're doing triple-screen)
 
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Thanks. Update: Ah, that page says that PCI Express video cards don't have PCI latency. (updated my post to mention I'm using PCI Express)

And yeah, from what I read, nForce4 boards are a "trigger" for the issue, but Creative's incompetence is the root cause. It's hard to know who's telling the truth, but I'm more than happy to add that failure to Creative's list, until someone can correct me.
 
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From what I read (a while back now), many problems were caused by bad shielding on the soundcard.
If you can create a faraday cage around the card without shorting anything, this might be your solution.
 
Dario D. said:
Thanks. Update: Ah, that page says that PCI Express cards don't have PCI latency. (updated my post to mention I'm using PCI Express)

And yeah, from what I read, nForce4 boards are a "trigger" for the issue, but Creative's incompetence is the root cause. It's hard to know who's telling the truth, but I'm more than happy to add that failure to Creative's list, until someone can correct me.
Click to expand...

You can still adjust your X-Fi's PCI latency settings ;)

And don't blame Creative, they look into the topic , found anomalies in the nForce PCI bus behaviour.
Some motherboards manufactors released BIOS updates that fixed the issue (most didn't), Creative did their best in the drivers to work around the nForce issue...and NVIDIA just turned the blind eye.


So to blame the lackluster nForce PCI implementation in Creative is far of base.
 
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