Dpc latency causing sound jitter. Please help

Hello, i got some problems with dpc spikes wich i believe that are causing by my HD 7790.

The most annoying among others is the dpc latency it causes while in idle, like browsing or doing light stuff. I recreated the same event in idle and load conditions.

While in load the dpc spikes are gone, and in idle the hell breaks loose.

Here are the videos with the same scenario in load and idle.

Idle - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arvgO3j28Gs - DPC spikes causing sound interruptions and jitters.

Load - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teOZBuC-9JI - no DPC spikes, all good.

My setup is the following

i5 3570k @ stock speeds

Asus P8Z77-V LK

2x4 gigs DDR 3 1600 mhz Cl 9 Kingston Dual Channel

SSD Kingston 60 GB V300

2 HDD's @ 7200 rpm

Creative audigy se sound card

Sirtec High Power 500 W PSU 80 + Bronze

Saphire HD 7790 Dual X OC 1 GB

These spikes happen on motherboard soundcard aswell, so my audigy its not to blame. I made a trace and they lead to hall.dll,usbport.sys, portcls.sys.

What i ve done so far - changed motherboard , tested ram with memtest, disconnected hard drivers, reinstalled windows 7 and 8 multiple times,tried lots of gpu drivers, including betas, disabled all cpu power saving option from bios, disable serial port, disabled HPET, nothing seems to have any effect.

The only fix i see is to somehow lock the clocks from shifting, RMA is not an option since they will stress test it and return with ok status. Also i need to set power to +10 from ati catalist in order to be stable,otherwise i get bsods.

Any advice is welcome, thank you.

 

Welcome to Majorgeeks, Mordecai!

Do you get the same results after disabling ULPS (I use Sapphire Trixx, you may be able to do it via the CCC, which I don't install) or when the BIOS is set to treat the graphics card as Gen. 2 instead of Gen. 3 (or vice versa)?

 

Hey satrow, thanks !

I ve set gen 2 in bios, disabled ulps and ticked force constant voltage and i see an improvement already, here are the current results. usbport.sys no longer spikes, but portcls.sys does.

Should i try to increase vddc voltage or unistall CCC ?

Thanks alot.

 

I'd not (yet) touch any voltage settings but I would uninstall unneeded CCC stuff: FUEL, anything 3D or not actually useful for base GPU usage.

portcls.sys is usually audio -related, disable the on-board audio in the BIOS and see if you can uninstall the drivers for it via Programs and/or Device Manager afterwards (assuming you're using the Creative - but they don't have the best reputation for the quality of their drivers either).

Don't fret too much over the data from LatMon or DPCLat, though both are very useful, as are the methods for troubleshooting this problem on their sites, the important thing is that audio/video is clean, no mouse/graphics lag, etc.

 

Well the sound jitter stopped after i made these settings, and while LatMon says portcls is spiking, DPClat is showing no spikes and a maximum of 203 us. Works for me.

Mind sharing your way of ati driver instalation ? I d like to skip CCC as well but i install it to disable those color enhancements that comes with it, which makes video quality worse rather then enhance it it.

Is TriXX needed to run at startup in order to retain those settings ?

Anyway, thanks a lot for those tips

 

That sounds good - pun intended

For the ULPS settings (which are only supposed to relate to Crossfire), they can be set in the Registry (Search HKLM for EnableUlps and set them all to zero - the entry(ies) in CurrentControlSet should be enough, I think).

ATI - Driver only installation - some things may have altered since the last edit, it's difficult to find the time to keep up with everything I have an interest in. EDIT: check also the recent entries in the topic that triggered it being written.

 

I knew this method already And yeah all sounds good, best forum on the interwebz right here.

Thanks a bunch, cheers

 

Now put your headphones on and crank it up for some real world tests, it beats messing with software and reading logs!

All my builds I try to keep as clean as possible, within reason and keeping a decent level of security; if I can keep auto starting processes and Services below 30 and only have the needed 3rd party drivers auto loading, I'm happy.