Sound problem on Soyo Dragon + Motherboard

I am getting garbled or stuttering sound in the following games: Ghost Recon, Land Warrior and Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator. Return to Castle Wolfenstein seems to be OK. I have other games but am not loading them now due to this problem.

I just installed a new Soyo Dragon+ motherboard, AMD XP1900, Gforce3 Ti 200, 60gig Drv, 256mg mem, Teac CD.

I tried installing a Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum but could not get it to install correctly so I just enabled the sound on the motherboard which is suppose to be 5.1 compatible.

I have reformatted and reloaded Windows ME about 8 times with different methods for loading all the drivers and such. Everything is up to date as for drivers I think. I tried going back to 98SE but still had trouble getting everything installed correctly so I went back to WiN ME.

Has anyone else ever experienced anything like this before? I put this whole system together mainly for games but the sound is terrible. Any help would be appreciated.

Welby

[NUTNDUN]

Have you tried moving the sound card to a different pci slot? I had this happen once and even though it wasn't sharing the same irq with anything else it wasn't being recognized correctly. The other thing you can try is if you install the sound card again try different slots and double check all of your settings in the bios to make sure that the onboard sound is disabled when using the card. If all else fails I would call creative and ask em whats up cuz there is no reason for it to not work on a 98 or ME platform.

[john80y]

I have an audigy and my motherboard also has onboard sound .

Firstly do not give up on the audigy its an excellent card... First thing you need to do before installing it is make sure that the onboard sound is deactivated or turned off ... This is either a jumper on the board or in the bios .

As for the stuttering sound with the onboard sound , you said one game it works fine and the others it doesn't ... Well if it works with one game then its 99% not a problem with the sound card ..

Georg,

Thanks for the info. I did try a couple of slots to no avail. Turning off the sound in the BIOS is very easy, I tried that too. I got tired of trying because sometimes the whole PC would get locked up installing drivers and then I wanted to start all over again. I figured turning on the sound on the MB would be just as good as the Sound Blaster 5.1 Live card and just live with it but that doesn't sound right. Not sure if the Audigy Platinum card is going to make any difference or not. The games I'm trying to play are very current. Only one works and the others don't. Seems weird to me.

I will take your advice and call creative. Just wondered if anyone else with Soyo Dragon + boards ever had this problem.

thanks

[NUTNDUN]

Have you checked creatives site for any updated drivers. Could be a possibility that the drivers that came on the cd are just a bad batch. Maybe try downloading the latest ones from creatives site and try that.

[jrwap]

There have been many reports of problems with the Soyo Dragon+ mobo. I was going to get the Soyo board before finally going with the Abit board. If the above recommendations don't work, try over at amdforums.com They have a whole forum dedicated to Soyo motherboards.

Good luck and let us know how it goes,

-JRw

[faolán]

I've run into this a couple times before as well. Windoze ME is not really the OS that you want to be playing games on, mainly because there are so many sound related issue with it (Google for something like "windows me sound" and you will find all sorts of horror stories). Personally I would recommend that you use 2k with at least Service Pack 2 installed.

You may want to check in you BIOS for a setting like Plug and Play OS, and try changing it to No or Off. Sometimes Windoze can get in a fight with your BIOS over who can control the sound card and when. I've had to do that for several different sound cards in various OS's.

Also, I seem to remember an issue with the sound in some games not working properly if hardware acceleration for your sound card is not enabled or not turned all the way up.