Can You Hear Me
Now?
I just put together a new PC
with the following parts:
an E2160 processor over-
clocked to 3GHz, an MSI P6N
Diamond motherboard, 4GB
of PC6400 Patriot Extreme
memory, two 8800 GT vid-
eocards in SLI, and an Antec
TruePower 550W power sup-
ply. I’m running both Vista
32-bit and XP 64-bit. The
machine was originally run-
ning on an ASRock Penryn
1600 motherboard.
My problem first
occurred when I was play-
ing Crysis—suddenly, the
main character’s voice
disappeared. I had an X-Fi
Fatal1ty card installed at the
time, so I tried reinstalling
the drivers. Still no voices.
The same problem hap-
pened regardless of what
operating system or game
I was using. I switched to
the motherboard’s built-
in sound, same problem.
I switched motherboards
to the MSI, same problem.
All the game’s background
sounds are there, and iTunes
and Windows Media Player
work fine.
—Tom GonzalesWell, hopefully after you
moved from your ASRock
board to your MSI board you
did an OS reinstall. While
swapping boards doesn’t
always make the OS wacky,
it can introduce errors and
issues that can certainly
hamper your troubleshooting
efforts. And, of course, ifyou’re overclocking and
experiencing issues, revert to
the stock clocks until you can
isolate the problem.
Also check to see that
you’re running the latest
BIOS updates for your nForce
board—there have been
numerous updates to address
incompatibility issues with
X-Fi cards. And make sure
you have the latest X-Fi driv-
ers installed from Creative’s
website. You may even con-
sider uninstalling the X-Fi
drivers and reinstalling them
from scratch
Finally, it sounds like
you could have the onboard
sound and the X-Fi running
simultaneously. This can
cause all manner of prob-
lems. At the very least, you
should disable the onboard
audio when the X-Fi is
installed. Since your issue is
so odd, you might even con-
sider removing the drivers for
the onboard audio, as well.
Finally, consider moving the
X-Fi card to another PCI slot
and reinstalling the drivers
one last time.Raiding the Raptors
I have a brand-new rig that
sports two WD Raptors in a
mirrored array. I wanted the
speed of the Raptors and the
convenience of a mirrored
array. But I wonder if a mir-
rored or striped array (1+0,0+1, or some other RAID
number) using four 7,200rpm
drives would be faster than
the above array. And how
would the price compare?
—David ThielAs a matter of fact, the
Doctor’s underlings have
compared the speeds of
various RAID configura-
tions (November 2007). With
Western Digital’s Raptor
drives, we found that a four-
drive 1+0 setup will outper-
form a two-drive mirrored
array any day of the week.
However, since a 1+0 setup
requires twice as many drives
as a mirrored array, it will cost
twice as much to create.
As for whether fourcheaper drives in a 1+0
setup would outperform a
mirrored Raptor array, it’s
certainly within the realm
of possibility. A mirrored
array of drives doesn’t offer
a gigantic performance
increase over just a single
drive. There’s an increase,
yes, but nowhere near what
a striped array offers.
Given that you can now
purchase drives that are
both larger and cheaper than
Western Digital’s Raptor,
the Doctor thinks your best
choice is to invest in cheaper
drives and create a 1+0 array.Pop-Up Problem
I am currently running
Windows XP Pro. EverySUBMIT YOUR QUESTION Are flames shooting out of the back of your rig? First,
grab a fire extinguisher and douse the flames. Once the pyrotechnic display has
fizzled, email the doctor at [email protected] for advice on how to solve
your technological woes.This month the Doctor tackles...
Soundcards
RAID Arrays
Soundcards
RAID Arrays
Soundcards
Booting Issues
The speed of two Raptor drives in a 1+0 setup crushes that of a
single drive and a RAID 1 mirror array, but little tops the power of
a two-Raptor RAID 0 confi guration.DOCTOR^
IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE ONE STEP AT A TIME70 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC|SEP 08 |www.maximumpc.com