Sound crackling with Z370-E

[daggerfall247]

Hey everyone,

I built myself a new PC during last week, it works pretty good and I'm satisfied with the performance. But one thing annoys me. The sound crackles randomly. It can be every few seconds or every few minutes.

I tried the following things yet:

1. Installing newest drivers from product site at asus.com. I installed newest drivers for every device. Beginning with sound driver to chip driver and gpu driver. Didn't work
2. In Realtek HD Audio Manager I changed the option "Mute the rear output device, when a front headphone plugged in" to " make front and rear output devices playback two different audio streams simultaneously" Didn't work
3. I tried different headphones, this time plugged in at the front panel. Didn't work. So the headphones aren't the problem.
4. I tried the audio output from the graphics card. Same problem. After this I suspected the SSD, because the plastic thing at the SSD where you plug in power and SATA cable is kinda loose.

5. To check the SSD I changed the SATA cable and plugged in the cable to a different connector at the MB. For the moment I thought it was better, but the problems still remained. Then I tried my old HDD with old Windows 7 installed (unplugged SSD with Windows 10), sadly Windows 7 didnt recognized my mouse and keyboard so I couldn't do anything, installed Windows 10 again. For the rest of the day it was all clean. (side note: I didn't close my PC case on that day) The next day I was sure to make use of the warranty for the SSD, closed the PC case, but the problem was still there. Then I changed back to the SSD and again I left the case open because I began to think It may kink some cables and it indeed was alright for the rest of the day. But today I didn't closed the PC case and there was it again.

I used DPC latency checker but the crackling doesn't correlate with latency spikes (there are a few).

I don't have any ideas left on what or how to check. I hope you guys can help me ❤️

Greetings,
daggerfall

My rig:

MB: ROG STRIX Z370-E Gaming Motherboard.
GPU: ROG STRIX gtx 1080 A8G (advanced)
CPU: intel i7-8700k 6x3,70 GHz (no OC right now) with bequiet Dark Rock Pro 3 cooler
RAM: 2x8Gb Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 Ram. (2666Mhz)
Drives: Samsung 850 Pro 256Gb
Seagate Barracuda 2Tb Sata6 7200 rpm

[Raja]

Disable the Nvidia graphics driver in device manager, and the re-enable it. See if you still get the crackling sound afterwards.

[daggerfall247]

I did but can't tell yet if it worked.

But I've got another idea. Everytime I changed something like the drives, I turned off the PSU power button. And when I did this it was good until the next restart. Maybe we can do something with this Information. I have a EVGA 650 P2 PSU.

[Raja]

daggerfall247 wrote:
I did but can't tell yet if it worked.

Please check.

daggerfall247 wrote:

But I've got another idea. Everytime I changed something like the drives, I turned off the PSU power button. And when I did this it was good until the next restart. Maybe we can do something with this Information. I have a EVGA 650 P2 PSU.

This is info we already have. There's a huge thread about all of this, here.

[daggerfall247]

After ~2hrs of music (in Chrome from Youtube) there is no crackling yet. This is what I meant with It's kinda random. But If I trigger Windows notification sound a few times really fast, I'll hear that crackling, right then when the sound stops just to start it again. So i assume it didn't fix it.

[Raja]

Perhaps the fact you're forcing the sound chime to trigger too quickly is causing some kind of latency issue. If it doesn't happen outside that, then I'd carry on using the driver reset workaround.