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Topic: Overheating Sound Card? (Read 6580 times) previous topic - next topic
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Overheating Sound Card?

Okay, so I have an old Creative/Ensoniq SoundBlaster PCI 4.1 Digital (CT5880 chip). It is the oldest device in my entire system running on a P4 3.2GHz processor and Intel D915PBL motherboard etc. For a long time I have had issues in Windows (and recently Linux) with my graphics card crashing. I have long blamed this on supposedly poor drivers by ATI. Several searches on Google have lead me to believe this was the case. Today, on a gaming forum I frequent - "Clan of the Dead Goat", a member posted about an issue that was very similar to mine. Symptoms include the graphics driver's "VPU Recover" function being called causing any graphics acceleration to halt. Within Windows and Linux in recently more frequent extreme cases, the entire system would simply halt and either display a garbled screen, or a non responsive screen. Any sound that had been playing prior to the crash is looped usually for a length of roughly a quarter of a second.
Another member or two of the aforementioned forum stated that the symptoms indicated a problem with sound card overheating. This afternoon while experiencing system instability after having listened to music in Foobar for several hours I had decided to shut down and open the case to check for any unusually hot components. Much to my surprise the sound card was hot. Any solutions for this problem that would not slow down any other PCI devices in my system?
I seriously hope that this will not mean I will need a double sound card solution (ie. Creative Audigy 2 and Chaintech AV10) as this card has been just about perfect for my needs.
Acid8000 aka. PhilDEE

Overheating Sound Card?

Reply #1 –
you could angle a fan onto it to cool it down or maybe you could attach a heatsink to it using thermal tape.
Who are you and how did you get in here ?
I'm a locksmith, I'm a locksmith.

Overheating Sound Card?

Reply #2 –
I guess I could. I've just ripped out the heatsink off the chipset of the system this sound card was originally in.

Edit:

Here's an image.



How would I go about fitting it on/attatching it, and which component would most need the heatsink?
Acid8000 aka. PhilDEE

Overheating Sound Card?

Reply #3 –
Overheating (too hot to touch) soundcard or modem = faulty.

Overheating Sound Card?

Reply #4 –
Lots of sound cards get hot to the touch.

You haven't proved anything until you run without the sound card for an extended amount of time and the machine's problems clear up.

After that you can point to the sound card.  Then you should run open case with the sound card in, just to see if running it cooler fixes the problem. It could be bad sound card drivers, bad chipset drivers, or the alignment of the moon in relation to a Tibetan yak. :-)

The point is that lots of chips in your pc run hot to the touch all the time.  They were meant to.

Overheating Sound Card?

Reply #5 –
It seems rather strange because I can play games using this card with EAX enabled for as long as say 12 hours if I wished to. That is, if the system doesn't go on a hanging fit several minutes after booting. I'm thinking fairly system intensive games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Soldier of Fortune 2 here.

I'll have to try isolate the problem so I can really identify whether it really is the sound card or my video card. Thanks for the help everyone.
Acid8000 aka. PhilDEE

Overheating Sound Card?

Reply #6 –
I suspect the problem is the graphics card. My system used to do this when the video card had a VGA silencer mounted on it and the weight of the heatsink caused the pins in the AGP socket to lose contact. The display would lock up and the sound would loop until it was reset.
 

Overheating Sound Card?

Reply #7 –
Heh. A while back I got a bag of mixed small heatsinks at a computer show. I hacked some down to make little sinks for the mosfets on my mobo, and used another to replace my north bridge with something more substantial. Then I was wondering what to do with the rest... One happened to be just the right size for my sound card. So I stuck it on, just for laughs. It has no purpose whatsoever, since my sound chip is a cmedia, not even as hot as an audigy.

Acid8000 - To find out whether heat is the problem, run the system with the side panel off, and maybe a small room fan pointing in. If you still get crashes and hangs, start looking at other problems. What you described sounds like a hardware problem though, so I would save the windows reinstall for last. Try memtest86 to look at your memory, and prime95 torture tests to work the cpu. If there are problems that you just can't fix after everything you can test, you might look at replacing your power supply. A dying psu is often a cause of strange non-specific crashes and problems.

Overheating Sound Card?

Reply #8 –
I forgot about this thread... hehe. Thanks for the suggestions. Prime95's torture test runs fine, and I still need to do that memtest app. I'm thinking it's something to do with the PSU, but strangely enough, no longer using a USB mouse and joystick has reduced the crashing, but I still get the occasional display artifact and sound hiccup.
Acid8000 aka. PhilDEE

Overheating Sound Card?

Reply #9 –
are you sure it's not an IRQ sharing problem?
Who are you and how did you get in here ?
I'm a locksmith, I'm a locksmith.

Overheating Sound Card?

Reply #10 –
I have considered that possibility. Tomorrow I probably will start changing the position of my two PCI cards (the sound card, and a digital TV tuner) and try assigning an unused IRQ number to the slot of the card. There are a few unused single digit IRQ numbers free at the moment.
Acid8000 aka. PhilDEE

Overheating Sound Card?

Reply #11 –
Try with less cards: Remove any other card like the tv tuner and the Ensoniq (try onboard sound) to see if you can reproduce the crashes. If so, its probably the graphic card and you could try adjusting the agp parameters or try with another graphic card.

Else it could be one of the cards conflicting with another or with a motherboard component. You could try disabling as much onboard things as you can, and adjusting pci settings.

But the very first thing to do is pinpoint the source of failure.

BTW: Don't use any overclock setting or "spread spectrum" setting for cpu or memory. Its also good idea you do the memtest86+ tests just in case.
She is waiting in the air

Overheating Sound Card?

Reply #12 –
Quote
are you sure it's not an IRQ sharing problem?
Heh, I'd almost forgotten about the existance of IRQ problems, they're so rare these days. But with an ancient sound card like that it just might be.

Quote
BTW: Don't use any overclock setting or "spread spectrum" setting for cpu or memory.

Never use spread spectrum ever. It will slow down, not speed up the system. The reason it is there that it will reduce EMI from the computer, which the mobo makers can use to do better on the FCC tests and such.

Overheating Sound Card?

Reply #13 –
Quote
Try with less cards: Remove any other card like the tv tuner and the Ensoniq (try onboard sound) to see if you can reproduce the crashes. If so, its probably the graphic card and you could try adjusting the agp parameters or try with another graphic card.
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Would this also apply to PCI-Express?
Acid8000 aka. PhilDEE

Overheating Sound Card?

Reply #14 –
I discovered that it really is not a heat issue as I had thought previously. When I checked the temperature of the card by hand last time, it was a very cold day, and what was an ordinarily warm card seemed hot. Yesterday, a much less cold day, I checked the card's temperature after a long time playing music (about 7 hours) and it was far from hot. Moving the card to another slot seems to have solved the problem so far.

Off topic: Does anyone here know whether enabling "ISA Enable Bit" would cause any problems (It has something to do with legacy PCI devices). One morning when getting annoyed at the computer, I decided to try enable it as it says legacy PCI devices require it. That same morning my computer did the same crash, but the first time it did crash after changing that setting, only the video froze. The rest of the system was working (music still played, numlock responds etc), but my video was completely frozen on the same frame. After that the crashes were exactly the same with the setting still enabled. Does anyone know whether this hinders another aspect of the system?

Thanks everyone for your suggestions. You have saved me a lot of frustration at this otherwise stable PC.

Update: Seems I have fixed the problem by installing the video drivers, and not installing the monitor ones. Yay! I hope this solution lasts.

Update 2: One new PSU and 2 new graphics cards later, this problem is finally gone. Wasn't the sound card at all.
Acid8000 aka. PhilDEE