Strange lag in games

[SwedishChef]

I've been having a problem with my newly built PC with strange stuttering, or more accurately, randomly occurring 2 to 3 seconds of lag in games such as BF2. It only happens about once every half and hour or so. Before it was actually crashing XP with an nv4disp.dll error but since I changed my RAM from CAS2 to CAS2.5 it's not been crashing at all, just stuttering. I have also noticed this once in media player when playing a movie. It's like the PC is waiting for some information before carrying on as normal. I only notice this when the soundcard is in use. Everything else seems fine.

The soundcard I'm using is a few years old but it's PCI SB Live soundcard and has been used in two other PCs without problem. I've got all the latest drivers installed, temps are fine and I'm not overclocking. I've run Memtest for 10 hours and it passed. 3D Mark 05 runs no problem. I've turned hardware sound acceleration down. I can't think what might be causing the problem. I wondering if my sound card is too old now but it's not *that* old? Or is it? Maybe I need to tweak a PCI setting in the BIOS? Maybe it's the motherboard? Any ideas really would be much appreciated.

Spec: Gigabyte K8N Sli Pro / AMD A64 3700 (with Arctic Freezer Pro 64) / 2x1GB Corsair TwinX 3200C2 RAM at 2.5-3-3-6 1T 200mhz / BFG 7800GT OC gfx card / 2 x 250GB Hitachi T7K250 in a RAID 0 setup / Windows XP Pro / Creative SB Live Digital 5.1 sound card.

 

[dale1uk]

Had similar probs with mine, thought the card was duff as whenever in pc it kept crashing so took it out and used onboard sound, few months later did a fresh install and remembered about the old card, gave it a try and all worked fine. must have been a software problem.
Just a quick question, since your using a sound card have you turned off the onboard sound in the bios?? If not they can conflict and cause all sorts of problems. Either that or sound card might be on the way out.

 

[SwedishChef]

Hi Dale1uk, thanks for the suggestion. Yes I had disabled the onboard sound in the BIOS. You've given me an idea though. Think I'll try removing the card and using onboard sound only and see what happens.

I did some Googling this morning and came up with a few other things to try that others had done for similiar issues:

Try turning cool and quiet off
Try turning fastwrites off
Try nvidia 7.77 gfx drivers or latest beta drivers v82.65 - or try drivers from motherboard CD
try altering PCI latency to 32?

Any other good ideas welcome!