HD 7870 HDMI Audio Dropouts

[Abby Normal]

Here is my situation. I have upgraded from a HD 5850 to a 7870 yesterday, and all seemed to go well, until I noticed that my receiver would keep resyncing the sound over HDMI. This causes silence in the source material, with the receiver causing a little pop in the speakers each time it does it.

The silence lasts for about 1.5 seconds, and this occurs every 5-7 minutes whether something is playing or not. The video feed stays intact and isn't affected by the drop in audio.

In addition to the audio dropouts I have had a few BSODs with the 0x0000003b Bug Check Code which seems to suggest video card/driver problems.

I have been using the Catalyst 12.3 build for this, and have been uninstalling and installing some of the older HDMI audio drivers in the hopes that something would provide different results to no avail. When I tried installing the 12.4 beta it bluescreened during install. Even if it would of worked it didn't have a new HDMI audio driver anyway, so I'm not sure it would of made a difference.

I “downgraded” back to my HD5850 and no problems present. Everything was as stable as it was before.

So I was wondering, does this seem more like a driver problem, incompatibility with my receiver, or just a bad card? Maybe even some settings that I could be missing?

My system specs are:
CPU: 3930K
MB: MSI X79A-GD65 (8D) 1.5 BIOS
RAM: Mushkin Enhanced Blackline 32GB DDR3 1600
Video Card: MSI Twin Frozr 7870
Receiver: VSX-919AH
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1

 

[sirmonkey1985]

could be incompatibility or heck could even be a bad HDMI cable as well. what audio settings are you using on the receiver? have you tried changing it between mp3, DD5.1/6.1/7.1(what ever your receiver uses), etc. etc. you can try going into the HDMI audio properties in windows and see if theres anything screwed up in there as well. i'm pretty sure AMD is still using the realtek HD audio chip just not sure which one, if you can find out which one it is you can try realteks site to find more up to date audio drivers.

 

[qbanb8582]

I would try a different cable. Also I would see making monitor manual detect in CCC makes a difference.

 

[Retsam]

Was the audio fine previously with the 5850?

It might just be one of those cases with a new product having drivers that are not yet mature. I dont see what else it could be other than a driver issue or bad hardware.

 

[Abby Normal]

I found out what can cause the problem, and why in my searches that I seemed to be the only one suffering from this.

The problem was that I had originally enabled PCIe3.0 in my motherboard BIOS. When I had changed back to my HD 5850 I had of course set it back to normal. I forgot to set it back today when I reinstalled my HD 7870, and except for windows BSODing when it tried to install its default drivers, everything worked just fine.

I was rebooting after re-situating everything back into position, when it occurred to me that I had left the BIOS alone. I re-enabled it and it BSODed after pressing enter in the log in screen into windows. I rebooted to see if I can't get back in with these settings, and once I did it didn't take long for that all to familiar sound of HDMI handshake hell to defile my ears. Different cables, different HDMI ports on the receiver, and different audio modes do not solve it once it has been set in motion.

I reset it back to PCIe GEN 3.0 [Disabled] and I got consistent reboots well before Windows could get to the log in screen.

Once it is done, it can't be undone without using another video card apparently to revert back to the state it was in before. I'm tired of this today, and I will give this all one last chance tomorrow. Before calling MSI support, unless anyone thinks this is more of an AMD issue.

I'm thinking there may be a lot of hell raised when Ivy Bridge gets released, and everybody else gets to experience these potential issues.

Was the audio fine previously with the 5850?

It might just be one of those cases with a new product having drivers that are not yet mature. I dont see what else it could be other than a driver issue or bad hardware.

Yeah the Audio worked perfectly with the 5850, still does in fact considering I didn't even have a chance to uninstall drivers this time to revert to this card.

And thanks for the suggestions everyone. Keep them coming.

 

[sirmonkey1985]

no definitely sounds like a board issue then.. if disabling/enabling pci-e 3.0 causes issues like that i'd say MSI probably needs to release a bios update for the 7800 series.

 

[Abby Normal]

Well it may not be a board issue, but an Intel one.

Intel after they launched the x79 platform started trying to downplay that they ever announced PCIe3.0 support. Now we know why:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2233372

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?p=33195594

Other users are suffering from BSOD hell with this. I wasn't able to find any of that since I've been searching for the HDMI issues in particular.

That unchecking PCIe GEN3 “forcing” it into PCIe 2 mode doesn't stop the BSODs seems to suggest that I may not have the option of using any of the current 28nm GPUs. Me thinks that I got screwed out of a hefty amount of coin in this situation.

I only had it working during one boot, and I'm not so sure that that will be repeatable, and that it wasn't just a fluke. I just don't know what to do at this point. I'll hope MSI will be able to suggest something.

I'm not even doing multi-monitor or crossfire for this. It is beyond ridiculous.