Choppy sound/freezing mouse problem

[Eagle Eye]

What cpu did you think your dad would get to replace the Celeron down the road?

You should check Direct Canada or NCIX.com they might have a dirt cheap Celeron or something a little more powerful.

Sorry that just the enthusiast in me, I can't bare to build budget computers or for that matter slow ones always has to be a little more powerful.

[Maplicito]

I don't know for sure what he's wanting... but if money's not too tight, I think he'd love to get something like a Q8200. I think a dual core would probably suit him better than a quad core - to be honest, his solitaire game won't notice the difference - but who knows, maybe he'll do something more processor intensive when he has a real processor.

[Eagle Eye]

Keep a look out here on the forums and periodically check the http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/buy-sell-trade/ you'll find fast CPUs at a good price used.

There is an E6600 for sale but that isn't compatible with the board either, lol.

[Maplicito]

Just thought I'd resurrect this thread now that the situation has changed, but the problem remains...

I put my old Q8200 processor in my dad's P5E3 Deluxe WiFi-AP@n motherboard with the following hardware: 2GB OCZ Gold DDR3 RAM, Powercolor HD 4670 1GB, SATA LG DVD Burner, IDE AOPEN DVD BURNER and an IDE 250GB HD the make of which I don't remember. The computer is running Vista Ultimate 64.

The CPU load will spike, and music will skip. I haven't had a chance to observe it much, but when it was running an old Celeron D (unsupported processor), CPU load would spike randomly, not just when playing music, and I suspect this is still the case. With the Celeron, going from XP to Vista reduced the skipping, and now going from the Celeron to the Q8200 reduced it further, but it is still there.

I have two theories as to what the problem is. I suspect that any drivers/firmware involved in running IDE devices is not up to snuff as it would largely be assumed a P5E3 user would be running SATA, and this is causing problems. My other suspicion is the PSU - it's an old 20 pin, and while the motherboard is supposed to be able to run a 20 pin PSU on it, I'm wondering if the PSU itself is maybe not as consistent as it should be, or as powerful as it claims, and maybe an unreliable source of power is causing system hiccups.

Aside from that, his system is identical to what I had previously been running without problems. Does anyone have an opinion?

[Eagle Eye]

Whats the make and model Map?

Its interesting theory and you're probably on the right track, the psu might not be supplying consistent clean power. Now that I think about you might a have a significant amount of noise on one of the rails and might explain the unexpected spikes. Do me a a big favour if you can observe the voltage read out of the cpu at idle and under load and track a spike let me know if there's any drastic drop or increase in voltage being supplied.

As to the CD-ROM/IDE seems highly unlikely to me, but some possible options are boot the computer without the CD-ROM and replace any IDE/Ribbion cables that could potentially be damaged.

Regards,

EE

[3 of 7]

The last time I had a system with choppy music playback it was the hard drive ( it was an ide as well) Have you run any tests on the drives involved?

[Maplicito]

I haven't ran any tests on the hard drive, although it's relatively new, was recently formatted, and ran flawlessly on the previous system. I will try testing it when I get a chance though.

The PSU is a Channel Well Technology ATX-450. Yes, ATX-450 really is the model name, I couldn't find anything else to identify it. Is Asus PC Probe II adequate for monitoring the voltages? If so, what I got was:

3.3v: 3.22 to 3.23v
5v: 5.02 to 5.04v
12v: 12.04 to 12.10v

I watched for CPU load spikes, and they are much less severe than they were with the Celeron D - using Core Temp as my guide, I didn't witness any one core go past 48% on a spike, and although I was doing nothing heavy, I was running PC Probe II, Core Temp, and IE at the same time as well... I wouldn't necessarily expect them to spike the load much, but who knows. Anyhow, the changes I did see in voltage didn't necessarily appear to be connected to the music skipping... and I'm not entirely sure the CPU load was either - I have trouble seeing CPU load being a problem when it never surpasses 48% on any one core.

Now, the new CPU and Vista do make this somewhat difficult, as those upgrades did smooth out the problems a lot - they're still there, but they're a lot more intermittent.

When I get some time, if the problem doesn't present itself earlier, I may pull my SATA drive out of my system (running the same motherboard) and try it in my dad's to see if this changes anything. If not - I have a Silverstone Strider 500w PSU on back order for my sister - as long as the back order doesn't take too long, I could run that in my dad's system too.

Any thoughts on the PSU?

Edit: Even if the PSU was originally good, it IS old. To give you an idea, my cousin built the original system for my grandma - I believe it was running a Duron 800. I also suspect it partially because my cousin did quite the job of either including parts my grandma didn't need, or putting in cheap parts - all at a tidy little profit.

[Maplicito]

I tried stressing my dad's system more... this time I was able to get all 4 cores to an 85 to 95% load as reported by Core Temp.

Vcore: 1.12 to 1.21v
3.3v: 3.20 to 3.23v
5v: 4.99 to 5.04v
12v: 11.82 to 12.10v

These voltages are all as reported by Asus PC Probe II.

I don't know enough to know if those are all acceptable ranges, or indicative of a problem.

[Maplicito]

Well, I took some time to work on my dad's computer, and I found the problem. It really truly is the IDE drive!

I swapped my power supply for his, the choppiness was still there. I swapped my hard drive for his - the choppiness was gone. Just to be sure, I put his power supply back in, and left my drive hooked up - still no choppiness. I took out my drive, and hooked his up, not hooking up the floppy or DVD drives, just to be sure that it was the hard drive - sure enough, the choppiness returned.

So... unless anyone has further ideas, he may just deal with it until a new SATA drive is in the budget.

[3 of 7]

If it's fairly new it should still be on warrenty no?