Is my audio breaking games?

[nickinbeta]

Hello all,

I have run into a rather bothersome issue where every game I play seems to suffer from intermittent stuttering/frame dropping also horrible hardlocking noises and screeching/scratching. And before you say anything, my system is more than capable of playing these games and has NOT had these issues in the past.

System specs:

Core i5 clocked at 3.2GHz
8GB DDR3 1600 RAM
ATI 5770HD
Audio card = (onboard Realtek HD Audio ALC888)

I was rather perplexed when this issue began to present itself. I did all of the usual things first, such as updating my graphics drivers, audio drivers, etc. However, the issue is still here and as annoying as before. What's really odd is the complete non-deterministic behavior of the "stuttering". It sometimes will go away for the first 15-min of gaming, then suddenly, surprise!!! It's back.

So I focused on the audio being the problem, and I messed with the settings to no end trying to get it to function normally while gaming (I'm running Windows 7 btw). Convinced my onboard audio was borked, I ripped out an old Creative SB Audigy from a system lying around the house. Lo and behold, it worked! ... For about a half of an hour until the locking and stuttering came back with a vengeance although this time it was much more scratchy than before.

Once again at a loss, I screwed with the Windows Sound settings and unchecked the "Give this device priority" setting. It worked for a while again, but now I'm back to square one with the problem.

Any ideas here? I'm starting to think my ram could be bad, but is the nature of my problem conducive to that theory?

 

[cyclone3d]

Kinda sounds like you might have a bad stick of RAM or the chipset on the motherboard is overheating or dying.

Or maybe you need to add a tiny bit more voltage to your CPU.