PC Processors

[alcapwn]

Specs:

•  AMD Ryzen 3800x
• GIGABYTE X570 AORUS ULTRA (F4i BIOS w/ AGESA 1.0.0.3 ABB)
• EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 Black
• 16GB DDR4 3600 (F4-3600C18D-16GTZRX)
• 512GB + 1TB XPG SX8200 Pro
• Seasonic PRIME Ultra 650W
• Avid MBox 3 (USB Audio Interface)
• Windows 10 x64 1903 (18362.267)
• AMD Chipset drivers v1.07.29.0115

I've been running into a stuttering/popping issue with my new AMD 3800x system. The audio device I'm using is an Avid MBox 3. It thankfully doesn't happen when playing games, but when playing music or at desktop, such as when a UAC confirmation window pops up, there is more often than not a terrible crackling/popping sound along with it. This didn't happen on my very old i5-2500k system so even though Avid drivers are not generally regarded as the best, I don't think they are to blame in this instance. I don't have any traditional PC style speakers to test the onboard audio and only 1/4" headphones (I'll try to borrow some 1/8" headphones from a friend when I can). Changing the power plan to Ryzen High Performance, or even the regular High Performance profile had no effect. Disabling SMT has not fixed this issue for me sadly. I made a post on the Avid forums but I have a feeling nothing will be done even if it somehow is on their end as all their USB/Firewire Audio Interfaces are EOL after 2019.

The other problem is that there is a large amount of stuttering + audio crackling/popping when trying to play a game remotely, via nvidia gamestream. This issue definitely cannot be related to the MBox as it's not even plugged in when playing remotely (it uses some form of passthrough via the nvidia drivers).

Update: Disabling SMT did not fix the issue as I originally thought, I have no idea why that one bootup it worked flawlessly but I have yet to get it to work normally since. Something else I noticed is that if SMT is disabled, windows performance monitor no longer correctly displays the clock speed and it shows just the base speed (in my case 3.89)

Update2: It seems it doesn't matter what game I run, it still stutters/crackles with remote play, I guess it just randomly was working fine when I tested Division 2 and BFV, as I tried them again and they're both doing it.

[brucer]

I had a z370 and 8600k that did that when I overclocked it past 4.8ghz..  It was one of two things,either the cpu was faulty or there was electronic noise involved or a bit of both.. I swapped to an 8700k and the issue went away but I wasnt pushing the voltage as high on the 8700k compared to what I was on the 8600k....

 Check and see if your voltages are spiking abnormally high.. Its kind of an issue with these new ryzens..I have a 3800x and I see it hitting 1.5v when it boosts with default bios settings..  You might try manually setting your voltage and load line calibration if your voltages are spiking.. It may at least give you an idea of whats going on..

[alcapwn]

Thank you for the reply, I already set the cpu and nb voltage from 'Auto' to 'Normal' and I see about ~1.464v spikes with the single core boost, and a constant voltage of ~1.452v during audio playback (although my cpu will max at only 44 multiplier instead of 45 when running my ram @ XMP 3600). Running the ram at JEDEC default of 2133 doesn't help with the crackling.

I took your advice and I changed the LLC from 'Auto' to 'Normal'. I'm also running the latest AMD Chipset drivers (1.07.29.0115) and they have seemed to mostly eliminate the crackling. It now seems to only happen the first time I minimize the audio player and open a browsing tab and then doesn't happen again until I close the music player and then the UAC windows will sometimes crackle. A big improvement from before when it would do it constantly during playback.

Still no change on the remote play sadly, I'm hoping it's somehow an issue on nvidia's side or possibly with the Windows scheduler; I've noticed that if I try to force core affinity on something (such as the nvstreamer.exe) it ignores that and still jumps around to different cores.

Update: I've discovered that when watching a YouTube video, there is a large amount of audio crackling if you fullscreen/minimize the video and during playback it occurs. I really have a hard time believing I'm the only one experiencing this.

[alcapwn]

While looking through device manager, I noticed that only the USB 3.1 had an AMD driver associated with it (the USB 3.0 and 2.0 seem to be generic devices). I removed all of the Avid interface drivers + restarted, reinstalled + restarted, and then plugged the interface into one of the USB 3.1 ports on my system. So far it's been working without issue.

For reference I have tried the same thing a few times before going between different 2.0 and 3.0 ports and both gave me the same crackling issue. The more interesting thing is this audio interface is USB 2.0.

I still want to test it for a few days as it has worked without crackling before for a short period of time but then it returns. I'm wondering if either the USB 3.1 ports have a more stable power delivery system (none of the Gigabyte x570 boards have their "DAC-UP" feature) or if there's something wonky with the USB 2.0/3.0 device drivers.

After a lot of testing I have at least finally figured out the issue with gamestream. While I have no idea why, this specific Intel NIC doesn't seem to like my WAVLINK WN579X3. I even went as far as to put my 2070 back into my old pc and run it for a few days and had no issues at all. That pc also has an Intel NIC albiet much, much older (Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z PCIE 2.0). I had to stop using the WAVLINK device and go back to my terrible FIOS MI424 router's wifi. Channel had nothing to do with it either as I tested with both running on Channel 1 (not at the same time of course) as neighbors are using Channel 6 and 11. And if it were a channel issue, the old pc would be experiencing the same problem. I hope a newer NIC driver possibly fixes the issue, but at least for now I can now use gamestream.

[mefisto_swe]

I know that I am a bit too late, but it may be useful for those who got this problem. In my case popping and crackling audio was because RAM could not sustain clock that it advertises. When I dropped from 3600MHz to 3400 everything worked fine.

[kidsix]

I also have an Mbox 3 and am having this same issue. I have a ryzen 5 2600 and an rx 5700xt. The crackle is bad enough I switch to the tv through HDMI from the graphics card only to deal with audio drop outs from that. Have you come across a fix for this yet because this is terribly annoying.

[Novahawk]

Try dropping from PCI-E "Auto" or PCI-E Gen4 to PCIE-E Gen3. This is what fixed it for me. There seems to be a widespread problem with running PCI-E Gen4 on AM4 boards.