Bizarre rhythmic audio pop/skip and more!

[fezz]

I have spent months on this problem and cannot solve it. A little while after I installed Windows 7, most games began to do a weird audio skip or pop. It's very consistent, you could almost keep a beat with how perfectly spaced they are. While it's mostly audio skips/pops/scratches the framerate seems to stall for a millisecond as well at the exact same time with each pop.

This happens ONLY in games. There has never been any issue with iTunes music or internet videos or anything else. I first noticed it in Mass Effect 1/2, then CODWAW, and even World of Warcraft. Some have suggested that my onboard audio could be causing the problem but I have found some people online with very similar problems who were using PCI audio cards I have reinstalled, updated, and repaired every driver or program imaginable. The only things I have read so far have been that it is possibly something with DirectX.

If you solve this, you will be officially crowned as COMPUTAR KINGZ.
Setup:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ 2.60GHZ
2GB DDR2
Gigabyte GA-M55SLI-S4 (rev. 1.0)
Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 512MB
Realtek 97 Onboard Audio
WD 160GB SATA
WD 80GB IDE
Windows 7 64-Bit

Oh yeah, and temps are completely where they should be. No overheating in terms of CPU or video card.

Thanks so much for your help everyone! Let me know if I forgot something!

 

[Dangman]

See if you can reinstall DirectX.

 

[fezz]

I was able to reinstall DirectX but the problem persisted.

 

[Dangman]

Does this issue persists after you've reformatted and reinstalled the OS?

If so, it's more than likely a hardware issue.

 

[spine]

Disable your sound card in device manager completely and see if the problem persists.

Sounds like an audio driver problem to me, so this should narrow it down.

 

[WaLieN]

I had something similar happen to me that turned out to be an audio driver. I updated the Realtek HD Audio driver to the newest one posted and that resolved the issue. Are you sure you have the latest driver?