crakling noise through speakers

[Guest]

Hello,

I have an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard and a P4 3gig CPU (o/clocked to
3.21g), 2 X 512mg PC3200 Kingmax DDR ram, an ATI 9600XT video card with the
latest Cat drivers, 2 X 160gig Seagate Sata drives config as RAID0 on the
Intel Raid connectors on the motherboard, 1 X Tekram U160 SCSI card that has
a 36gig Fujitsu 10K U320 drive (boot drive) as well as a Western Digital
80gig IDE drive with a SCSI adapter attached. Two optical drive, Liteon
1653 DVDRW and Pioneer 109 on IDE Channel 2.

Also installed on the motherboard is an an Audigy 2ZS Sound Card, an a
Leadtek XP2000 Expert TV card. I also have the motherboards USB and
Firefire ports enabled.

I have had this setup for approx. 6 months and other than changing the SCSI
boot drive from an old IBM 10k 18g drive to the Futjitsu. I have also
recently installed the two optical drives which replaced an on LG DVD
burner.

The problem that I have recently become aware of is that during hardisk
activity of the main boot drive ( the Fijitsu SCSI drive) I can hear
crackling coming from the speakers (Logitech 640s). Granted the problem
may have been there before but now it is very noticable especially as the
speaker volume is turned up.

I was thinking that it might be an IRQ issue and have swapped the sound,
scsi and TV cards around in the PCI slots, but the crackling buzzing sound
of hardisk activity can still be heard throught the speakers.

I have the latest Audigy drivers installed.

Has anyone any ideas what the fix could be??

Regards,
Shane

 

[Mercury]

There is a setting in the PCI settings section of the bios. Something like
PCI Latency Timer which should normally have a value of 32. If it is too
high (64, 128, max 256) a PCI device can hog the bus and do such things. If
it is too low then performance can suffer.

See http://www.rojakpot.com/ for more bios info.

HTH

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your help. I changed the scsi LVD cable as the old one appeared
to be a bit frayed. Now I do not have any of that offending noise!!

Thanks,
Shane

 

[Mercury]

Well, thats amazing!
A lose connection on a scsi cable causing fuzzy sound & no crash.

 

[Rob Hemmings]

Probably RFI screening was damaged on scsi cable rather than the data lines.