Need help with sound on motherboard!!

[webe3]

OK, I have recently had an Asus A7N8X Deluxe Motherboard put in, I am currently using a Soundblaster Audigy 2 soundcard. I have been told by many people that I should just use the onbaord sound as it will blow the Audigy 2 out of the water! I have also noticed that I have been getting random bluescreens "IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL" and microsoft says this is due to a driver not being read properly by the operating system. I went to the store where they sell the Asus motherboards and told the person there that I thought these bluescreens could be due to my RAM (I have Micron PC 2700 333mhz - 2x512 sticks-slots 1 and 3 dual channel) I told him I had the Audigy 2 installed and the motherboard sound disabled in the BIOS. He told me that he had numerous complaints about soundblaster sound cards in the A7N8X Deluxe and when people took them out and used the onboard sound, the bluescreens stopped! Problem is that I DO NOT KNOW HOW to go into my BIOS and change it to use the onboard sound!! I can take my card out and take all of the drivers out by cleaning the registry with aa tools and even erase all traces of them by using evidence eliminator, BUT HOW DO I GET INTO MY BIOS ON THE ASUS A7N8X Deluxe?? When I am there....WHAT DO I CHANGE?? I am a complete NEWBIE at this motherboard and have NEVER been into the BIOS, I had the people that came and built my system disable the onboard sound for me! They asked at the time...why and I told them I already had a sound card!! Could this be a poblem that could cause windows xp to bluescreen?? I don't mind taking out my sound card, but I need to know HOW to replace it with the onboard sound! I still have my CD for the motherboard. Could somebody tell me step by step how to enable my sound in the BIOS?? Also, do I need the CD for the drivers for onboard sound?? And lastly, will I have to reinstall the drivers everytime I reformat?? If anyone can take the time to help me thirough this I would appreciate it! Mabye this will stop the bluescreens....if it doesn't, I may have to look for another kind of motherboard.

[RipperRoo]

to access the bios of A7N8X Deluxe hold down the delete key at powerup, the first thing i would check in the bios (before removing the sound card) is the irq assignments, as some sound cards require irq 5 to be reserved in order to ensure correct function. use the arrow keys to move to the advanced menu and put the setting for 'resources controled by' to manual it it isnt already, then go into the IRQ resources menu you can then access and set IRQ5 to yes (reserved for legacy device)

exit and save changes and hopefully your blue screen irq problems will be a thing of the past.


FYI: instructions relating to your bios can be found in your motherboard manual from page 39 to 69.

if you dont have a manual to your board you can find one Here (pdf format)

let us know how you get on, if needs be ill post instructions for enabling your onboard sound.

[webe3]

Thanks Ripper Roo! Will let you know what happens!

[webe3]

Well, I got into the BIOS and set the IRQ 5 to reserved! (All other IRQ settings are on automatic!) Hopefully, this will eliminate the bluescreen problem and I can keep on using my Audigy 2 sound card! I won't know until it happens again, but I will give it a couple of weeks of normal usage and see what happens! Hopefully....NO BLUESCREENS! I will re-post if I have any more problems! Thanks!

[RipperRoo]

no problem, be sure to keep us up to date (one week no blue screens ect).

[webe3]

Another thing someone suggested is to make SURE the INTERNAL sound is off by going into the BIOS, then to advanced tab , integrated peripherals and turn off "Onboard AC97 Audio Controller" and "Onboard AC97 modem controller" They were BOTH set to AUTOMATIC and I set them to DISABLED myself. I told the guys working on my motherboard to disable the sound in the BIOS because I KNEW that would cause problems, but apparently they didn't!! Hopefully, now with the onboard modem and sound turned off and having my IRQ 5 reserved for my sound card that should fix my problem! Here's to hoping!

[webe3]

WELL MY DAMN BLUESCREENS ARE BACK! I really don't know WHAT to do! I have set xp up so that I can copy the blue screen message down the next time it comes up. I notivced that the last time it came up and said something about "the size of the PAGEFILE/SYS is not valid" whatever that means!

[webe3]

I have talked with creative labs and they told me that the audigy 2 does not have one sopecific IRQ it uses like older cards do. He said the usual IRQ slots were 5,7,9and 11. So I went ahead just to be on the safe side and reserved those in the BIOS and saved and rebooted. He also showed me how to go into msconfig and on thge boot.ini tab where the advanced button is , put a check mark beside the \pcilock. He said this would prevent windows from trying to change my settings back to default. I guess we'll see what happens now!

[igalan]

Reserving a IRQ does not do exactly what RipperRoo explains for your Audigy, because this is a Plug and Play board. This function is to avoid PCI Plug And Play devices to use a IRQ already in use by Legacy devices (because the Plug And Play Manager is unable to know what IRQ uses a Legacy ISA board). Since you don't use Legacy ISA boards, just leave all IRQ to automatic. Because nForce 2 boards use APIC (Advanced Programable Interrupt Controller) you have over 20 IRQ instead of the usual 15 (many of which are already in use.)

I have this same motherboard in my main computer at home, but not here, so I can't point you exactly to where you should look. Anyway:

1.- Install the latest nForce driver (2.45). If you have an older version it's important that you uninstall it first from Add/Remove programs.
2.- If you installed drivers 2.41 or other drivers with SW IDE Driver (not In-a-box IDE), uninstall it as well before installing 2.45.
3.- Also go to the BIOS and set FSB to RAM ratio 1:1 (so the RAM runs at the same speed of the FSB.) This means that if your CPU FSB is at 133 MHz, your RAM will run at 133 x 2 (266 DDR); for 166 MHz the RAM will run at 166 x 2 (333 DDR). This configuration is the most stable and is faster than running the RAM asyncronously (like CPU FSB 166 MHz and RAM at 200 x 2 -400 DDR-.)

If this doesn't fix the problem:

- Remove the Audigy and enable the onboard sound (you already know where to do this, don't you?).

Again if this is not the problem:

If you have two sticks of RAM, remove one and try. If the problem is still there, remove the other and put the first back on.

Also which motherboard version do you have? (it's labeled on the board itself, between the end of two PCI slots if memory serves.)And BIOS version? You may need to update the BIOS.

Tell us how this works, and we'll see what to do from there.

[webe3]

Well I have the LATEST BIOS for the asus a7n8x deluxe that was the first thing I upgraded! As far as the other suggestions, I will try those.

[webe3]

You talk of setting the "FSB to RAM ratio 1:1" OK......the ONLY thing I can find in the bios that comes close to this, is in advanced chipset features called FSB spread spectrum and it has 3 choices: 1. disabled 2. 0.50% and 3. 1.00% is THAT what you were talking about?? I need you to be as specific as possible because I don't want to mess anything up. Can somebody tell me where this is exactly??? By the way....right now it is set to 0.50% do I need to change it to 1.00%????

[webe3]

I went ahead and set it to 1.00% and it does run faster (it was set to 0.50%) but I won't know if it helps stop the crashing until the next time it happens or not! I also upgraded the video drivers to 2.5 and by the way, I have REVISION 2.0 on my motherboard and BIOS version 1006.

[igalan]

Not it isn't Spread spectrum (I don't know what does this setting), there is a setting like CPU to RAM Ratio or something similar. To modify this you have to set some RAM setting from Auto to Manual. As soon as I'm at home I'll check and post exactly where you have to look.

It can help if you post more information about the error message (not addresses or registers, but the whole description.) This kind of problems can be difficult to trace, but often are a driver not working properly or ram not working properly.

[RipperRoo]

Reserving a IRQ does not do exactly what RipperRoo explains for your Audigy, because this is a Plug and Play board. This function is to avoid PCI Plug And Play devices to use a IRQ already in use by Legacy devices

it may not do it for the Audigy, but it does for the SBlive, when i suggested reserving IRQ 5 for legacy i got my info directly from the PDF manual, it seams that dispite the boards plug and play abilitys some sound cards do still require irq5 to be reserved.

[igalan]

Originally posted by RipperRoo
it may not do it for the Audigy, but it does for the SBlive, when i suggested reserving IRQ 5 for legacy i got my info directly from the PDF manual, it seams that dispite the boards plug and play abilitys some sound cards do still require irq5 to be reserved.

Yes, you're right, but the SB Live had a legacy emulation driver for Windows 9X (like a driver for a ISA card), for this reason PCI cards should not use this IRQ; so you had to manually reserve the IRQ in the BIOS. With Windows XP you don't have to do this.

Also Windows XP handles IRQ in this mobo differently. Even if you see a shared IRQ during POST, Windows XP uses a different Interrupt Controller (APIC) that can handle more interrupt lines, so with Windows XP those IRQ will not be shared (or at least not all of them.) This is now handled by the nForce2 southbridge.