You see, I’ve got an Asus A8N-E motherboard, which has integrated audio with the Realtek AC’97 Codec. Now, I was a good boy, and installed the drivers that came originally with the Motherboard CD. The drivers that shipped on it were the ones provided by Realtek. The mixer, was designed by Asus, and trust me it did NOT look nice (or sound nice, as I later found out.)
Half an year later, nVidia released its own driver for the sound chipset (the A8N-E had a nForce 4 chipset). However, I was aghast to find that the nVidia driver did not come bundled with a mixer! Went back to Realtek. Fast-forward another 6 months, and nVidia releases an audio driver with a bundled NvMixer. I was so happy. After installing it, I realised that it had much better quality than the Realtek one.
But then, another couple of months later, I downloaded Process Explorer and noticed that my DPC usage was 5-8% when playing songs. I’m a performance freak and I didn’t like that. I browsed around on the Microsoft SysInternals Forums, and found about a tool called RATTV3, which helps monitor Interrupts and DPCs from different processes. I noticed that some process starting with ‘nv’ was causing problems.
‘nv’ generally stands for nVidia.
I came to the conclusion that one of my nVidia drivers was causing problems (I also own a nVidia 6600GT). I uninstalled all of them and found that the problem was gone. I installed them back, one by one, and when I installed the motherboard drivers (they were all together), the problem began again.
Then I began the painstaking process of uninstalling each of the mobo (read motherboard) drivers, and reinstalling them one by one. When I installed the Audio Driver, the mystery was solved.
I had mixed feelings.
I didn’t feel like uninstalling the NvMixer, It used to enhance bass without distorting it. I was going to miss all that. I uninstalled it for some days, but couldn’t live without it, and today, I am re-installed it, although an older version through the nVidia site, in the hope that my problem will be fixed. Alas, it didn’t work, but who cares.
I’ve got the bass!!!
October 7, 2007 at 11:53 pm
I’ve noticed this as well. With the nvmixer equalizer enabled the DPCs shoot up when listening to music and playing games. Even worse they stay at this level even when the system is completely idle! The workaround I use us to click on the ‘System Default’ button in nvmixer. This sends the DPCs back to normal.