Graphics in Games + web video playback affecting sound (snapping, crackling)

[greyghost]

First and foremost: Relevant Computer specs.

ASUS Sabertooth 990FX Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition Thuban 3.3 GHz, 3.7GHz Turbo Socket AM3
G.Skill Ripjaws 8GB (2x4 GB) DDR3 SDRAM (PC3 10666)
EVGA SuperClocked GTX 560 Ti 1 GB 256-bit GDDR5 x2

I built myself a new computer back in September and ever since I began to play WoW, I've been suffering with what seems to be a static-ish crackling noise affecting sound playback in all my computer applications. I normally am able to predict when it starts up and can normally resolve it by shutting down lots of programs -- it occurs whenever I tend to have WoW + several browser tabs, or a youtube video at 720p+ playing, or if I have streaming video from Twitch.tv. The liklihood of this sound problem occuring diminishes greatly when Anti-Aliasing/Multisampling is turned off.

I've also gotten the issue to manifest itself immediately whenever I play Guild Wars and use an alcoholic item. For those who don't know, when you drink booze in Guild Wars, a strong post-processing effect overwhelms the screen, distorting it like a carnival mirror and tinging the UI orange/green/brown. When I do this, the sound crackles FURIOUSLY. Relogging, changing characters, and even bringing up the world map immediately ceases the sound crackling.

• At first I thought it was an error with my motherboard's on-board sound, so I purchased a sound card, went into the BIOS and disabled the native sound options, installed the sound card.... the problem persisted.
• I then got a new video card, thinking that perhaps the video card was affecting my sound. Didn't work.
• I used an old video card that was a different GPU type from my old computer, that never had this problem. Nothing changed.
• I went barebones with my nVidia driver installation, uninstalling the nVidia HD Audio drivers, doing a full clean uninstall and not installing the nVidia sound stuff. Nothing. The sound crackling persisted.
• I figured, "maybe I don't have enough graphics processing power?" So since I had two identical GPUs, I SLi'd them (after a bit of effort with that). I have amazing FPS now and can play Skyrim at Ultra @90+ FPS but I still have sound crackling in WoW and Guild Wars.
• I also did an audio chipset update. No dice.
• I've gone into the Windows Registry even to disable extraneous HD Audio features and what have you, nothing changed. This was done before I did the selective installation of nVidia driver features.

So now I'm left with it being a memory problem, possibly. I sat back and eagerly awaited the release of the 64-bit client, hoping that would resolve the issues since I saw on the PTR the client was able to run at a higher amount of virtual memory before the sound issues occured. I have the 64-bit client now, and alas... the sound problem still occurs at the exact same amount of vmemory/working set that WoW did with the 32-bit client.

My next options that I think I'll try out next is a BIOS update, then possibly buy new RAM if that doesn't work. Otherwise I am absolutely perplexed about what is causing this issue. I have searched online over and over, each time trying a different wording, finding a different solution... I try it, and nothing helps.

Help me MMO-C Computer Forums. You're quite literally my last hope.

[juzalol]

I had similar issues earlier. I thought it was sound for a long time, but as it got worse
I found out it was the whole system chocking for like a millisecond.

I tried:
Swapping GPU to the 2nd PCI-E slot
Updating and Downgrading drivers
Different RAM sticks
Overclocking
Voltage tinkering
Rebuilding my system
Checked CPU slot pins are straight
Flashed BIOS to 2 different versions

And probably a bunch of other stuff I can't remember

Month or so forward my system detected but couldn't use the 3rd 2GB ram stick I had in.
Tested all sticks individually and came to a conclusion that the MOBO was at fault.

I RMAd the MOBO and haven't had issues ever since.

Edit:
I only had problems with certain games too. ie. WoW(especially in major cities), Counter Strike: Source(really bad),
but I was able to play SC2 with no problems at all.

Your problem sounds like an exact duplicate of mine, probably the MOBO.

[greyghost]

What drives are you running and in what configuration (e.g. Single Drive, Multiple non-RAID drives, RAID0, RAID1, etc)?

Just one drive, no RAID or anything like that. This particular one, in fact.

Yeesh, HD prices really did rocket up. I swear it was only 89 bucks when I bought it.

---------- Post added 2012-02-15 at 10:07 PM ----------

I had similar issues earlier. I thought it was sound for a long time, but as it got worse
I found out it was the whole system chocking for like a millisecond.

.....

Your problem sounds like an exact duplicate of mine, probably the MOBO.

The other day, I did have a bizzare system 'chokedown', which resulted in my computer forgetting I had video drivers installed after I rebooted. I had to reinstall them and it resolved the issue like nothing had happened.

And when I did first have these problems and mentioned it to a friend, he immediately accused the motherboard being the culprit. It really might just be the case, which is what I was hoping to avoid since it's such an annoying thing to replace or rebox for an RMA (as I had to put in a custom heatsink mount for the CPU).

I guess it's something I really just HOPED it wasn't the motherboard.