ATI Radeon 9550 Video card gives my DAW POPS !!! Please help ......

Hi all !

This has got me beat.

I have built numerous DAW's for myself and colleagues and never had a problem, but this has got me tearing my hair out ....

I have previoulsy used nVidia chispet video cards - for this new system, I changed the nVidia 64meg to a ATI Radeon 9550 256meg ... and for some reason I get pops / clicks on playback even with just one audio track and regardless of latency ?!?!?!?!

For the first time ever, when setting up a DW, I now dont know what to do !!

The DAW is a S/Diego 3700 o/c to 2.8gig, 1 gig Corsir DDR, Asus A8V Dlx Via board, Delta 66, M-Audio 2x2 Midi USB, all *latest* drivers and bios etc.... i have alos tried previous BIOS verison, previous Driver versions ....all the same ... the problem is stil there

This rig, with my test video card [ nVidia GForce 2 MX 400 64 meg ] works *perfeclty* at all latecies down to 1.5ms - and I mean *perfectly*

As soon as I put the ATI Radeon 9550 256meg in - and do a full driver clean out e5tc.... - I get pops / clicks etc ......

I have tried all the usual things like video acceleraton - there are no IRQ conflicts or sharing of any resources etc.....

Can anyone PLEASE help me out here ?

Are ATI Radeon's known to be problematic in DAW's ?

Is there some setting I am missing out on ?

Is there an known set up "trick" that AT Radeon chipsets need when running in a DAW ?

Tim

timboe,
It's a wild guess, but try reducing the size of the video aperture in your BIOS. Just because the card has 256MB RAM doesn't mean you have to use all of it for the AGP aperture. Try setting the aperture in the BIOS to 64MB or even 32MB if it will let you and see what happens.

As far as I understand it, the big video memory pipeline is only needed for video intensive applications, like games and animation. I'm not sure if dual screen monitors fits that description. And a big aperture is an IRQ resource hog AFAIK.

Worth a try.

--thndrsn.