Help with my intermittant hdmi sound issues on an ati 3850 card

September 10, 2009 10:20 PM

I've got an Asus p5e3 mobo and an Gigabyte 3850 hdmi setup to my 42" 720p with major sound issues. I've completely undone any overclocking due to this issue. I was running at 3.6 as opposed to 3.0 ghz and had ram running at 1600 as opposed to 1366 mhz.

Almost every other time I issue a video request over FireFox and Flash, I get audio but the audio cuts out after 1-2 seconds. It's like the audio can't "grab onto" the connection. It's also now happening with the now free DDO Dungeon and Dragons online client. All game clients previously worked, eg. warcraft, evo online, the sims 3, etc, etc. All native applications seem fine, as lond as they're MS or tight MS integrated apps.

This issue pops up every time I switch sounds from FF to some application. Audio works fine for almost every application except for Firefox which seems to "forget" it's hook into audio.

Sorry, lil tired so I realize the holes. Please ask me to post the pertinent info.

posted by prodevel to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Probably a super-obvious question but have you tried updating your drivers? Or, better yet, completely removing your sound drivers, and installing them afresh?
posted by turgid dahlia at 10:25 PM on September 10

Oh and it seems to ALWAYS work for WMC and for my esoteric Video Lan Player app. Microsoft hates my FireFox browser on Win7 build 7100! :(((
posted by prodevel at 10:28 PM on September 10

I've tried completely disabling every other sound device including the optical. I've tried every version of Catalyst Control Center. I'm using 9.7 as it seems "less offensive" than 9.8. No matter the software/hardware involved, when I open up the volume mixer, the sound is laggy ie I only hear the end of th sound even on the windows componenents. The FireFox Mixer oupute is ALWAYS mute.
posted by prodevel at 10:51 PM on September 10

I've tried 9.5-9.8 versions of software to no avail, unfortunately. I've also tried disabling/enabling combos of internal/mobo combos of audio as well. To the point that I had zero audio at times.
posted by prodevel at 10:54 PM on September 10

IT's hard to tell from what you're reading... it sounds like it could be a driver issue, because certain apps specifically work whereas others do not... it seems to me that certain software just isn't playing nice with your HDMI, because perhaps it's using a different method of playback... The problematic methods seem to have "sporadic" and not constant issues..

My knowledge of PC audio over HDMI is somewhat limited, but what I can tell you is that I've read enough to know that it's immature and not great just yet... The biggest issue being that multi channel audio over HDMI is not possible on most standard setups these days... Maybe the apps you're having issues with are trying to send multi channel (i.e. surround sound) audio and that's not going so well? It's hard to say without deeper diagnosis...



Another potential option to look at:

You don't mention anything at all about the video signal having issues at the time the audio cuts out... are there any flickers, etc on your screen? If so, then it could be an HDMI handshake issue.. I ran into this with some machines I'm using for kiosks for work... basically we have to unplug the HDMI cable, switch the TV's input selector, plug it back in, and switch it back.. then the devices redo their handshake and work great... for a time... until either the computer goes into standby mode, or someone changes the input on the TV, then changes it back... then the video / audio glitching issues return...
posted by twiggy at 11:19 PM on September 10

Are you running WHQL drivers?

Also might be a bug/defect in the beta OS you're running.
posted by wongcorgi at 4:30 AM on September 11

The video signal is always perfect. I've even tried switching the cable to the "furthest connection from the mobo" as suggested in one post on the net. They're not WHQL as I've received Catalyst 9.7 previously via windows update. The drivers have supported win7 64 bit for a few months now and I've upgraded to Catalyst 9.8 today - I may downgrade again if it doesn't work as well as 9.7 again.
posted by prodevel at 9:29 AM on September 11