Pretty high end specs and still getting choppy sound while extracting/installing?

[vziera]

So my specs is:
processor : i7 980x
RAM : 6gb ddr3 mushkin ram
HDD : 500gb x 2 wdc black 7200rpm in raid 0
Soundcard: X-fi Titanium HD
GPU : GTX580
Powersp : Toughpower Grand 750 gold
Ext HDD : WDC mybook essential 2tb usb 3.0 (gets very slow when accessed after long idle)
**never overclocked**
Sometimes the music being played in the background gets stutter for a sec or two while either installing a 20gb game or extracting 10gb files at the same time, Is this normal? any workarounds for this? :\

 

[seronx]

What are your speakers?

 

[vziera]

What are your speakers?

The old altec lansing mx5021?

 

[seronx]

The old altec lansing mx5021?

Find speakers that have 15~hz - 30~kHz system response

150hz -18kHz <--(front speaker specs) most speakers today are 30hz - 20+kHz

See if that solves your problem

 

[vziera]

Find speakers that have 15~hz - 30~kHz system response

150hz -18kHz <--(front speaker specs) most speakers today are 30hz - 20+kHz

See if that solves your problem

would you like to give some reccomendations?

 

[qubit]

Find speakers that have 15~hz - 30~kHz system response

150hz -18kHz <--(front speaker specs) most speakers today are 30hz - 20+kHz

See if that solves your problem

Speaker specs are completely irrelevant to the problem.

The stutter is being caused due to the heavy I/O load being placed on the computer. Sometimes a driver update can help.

 

[vziera]

Speaker specs are completely irrelevant to the problem.

The stutter is being caused due to the heavy I/O load being placed on the computer. Sometimes a driver update can help.

could it be because I don't use ssds?

 

[Fourstaff]

Do you use Windows Media Player?

 

[vziera]

vlc player mate
I haven't used wmp in a while

 

[TIGR]

Like qubit said, the speakers are almost definitely not the problem. One easy thing you could try is to give VLC highest priority in task manager when it's stuttering. See if that works.

Find speakers that have 15~hz - 30~kHz system response

150hz -18kHz <--(front speaker specs) most speakers today are 30hz - 20+kHz

See if that solves your problem

Speakers that claim those specs usually can come nowhere near them. And if they can, there's usually a steep dropoff in volume as sounds approach the lowest and highest frequencies. It's usually best to ignore the paper specifications for speakers, headphones, etc. and look for independent reviews instead.

 

[yogurt_21]

could it be because I don't use ssds?

no but you could try running your hard drives in standard mode instead of raid. I could easily see a bad raid causing this.

 

[erixx]

May sound funny, but try the Xfi in another pci(e) slot. Sometimes does wonders.

 

[naoan]

check your dpc latency, sometimes some driver cause this problem

this page explain it pretty good http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

 

[vziera]

I'm just hoping I don't need to swap my speakers for at least next couple of months but I'll do it now if it does turn out to be the cause.
And since I have used more than half of the raid's capacity, it would be tough for me to run standard mode/IDE.
Also tried moving the x-fi to another pcie, nothing's changed.
As for my dpc result, I'm getting this:

[/IMG]
I hope it's an accurate app because there have been many misleading benching apps these days :\

 

[Mussels]

is the lag when using your USB drive? because USB 2.0 is slow as shit, and wont handle doing two things at once...

 

[vziera]

is the lag when using your USB drive? because USB 2.0 is slow as shit, and wont handle doing two things at once...

not sure but I have an external hdd attached to one of my usb ports, I'll check it out.

 

[naoan]

dpc latency usually doesn't correspond to cpu usage, that's why it is so bewildering. some app also may cause this beside bad driver (firewall, for instance).

 

[D4S4]

so you say the sound simply drops out for a second? i'm almost willing to bet my ass it's buffer underrun. i know you can increase buffer size in winamp to fix this but i haven't messed with any of the other players.

buffer underruns shouldn't be happening on any modern systems but for some reason they do (it pisses me off since i don't have a PIII in my system), let alone on a 12 thread system. the only valid reason i can think of is excessive disk usage but it looks more like poor resource usage by software (player and/or windows)

try using winamp with buffer lenght of 2000 ms, it should cure all the underrun issues.

 

[qubit]

so you say the sound simply drops out for a second? i'm almost willing to bet my ass it's buffer underrun. i know you can increase buffer size in winamp to fix this but i haven't messed with any of the other players.

buffer underruns shouldn't be happening on any modern systems but for some reason they do (it pisses me off since i don't have a PIII in my system), let alone on a 12 thread system. the only valid reason i can think of is excessive disk usage but it looks more like poor resource usage by software (player and/or windows)

try using winamp with buffer lenght of 2000 ms, it should cure all the underrun issues.

I'll bet it's this, so bloody obvious now. Nice one.

 

[Mussels]

the buffer underrun is what i was getting at with his external drive and the questions i asked, rather than the drive being the performance limit, it could well be his USB 2.0 bus/controller choking.