m11 r2 audio lag problem after reformat

hey guys have a messed up situation here. i have a m11-r2 with the i7-640 with 4gigs of ram, the nvidia 335m gpu and 500 gb harddrive. i got this laptop for djing and gaming because its portable, powerful and looks cool in the dark . anyways i reformated it a while ago using the recovery disks and an external cd drive and had to manually install all the drivers from the dell website, as far as i know theres no other way to bring it back to factory specs. anyways so after reformating the laptop the audio lags, skips, basically cuts out for a split second every few seconds. this is a huge problem for me because as i said im a dj and any stoppage of the music is catastophic. I have an external soundcard i use for djing and it has the same effect as the built in one. happens when playing games, using my dj program (m-audio torq 2.0) and even youtube vids. all drivers are up to date, etc. tried a program called latencymon i heard it could sniff out any problems and as far as i can tell it failed horribly. attached screenshots of latencymon's findings. i have a huge show coming up soon and im kinda upset that such an expensive computer would have such a bad problem with a basic function (sound). i used a netbook for djing before so i know its not stressing the system. any input/thoughts and opinions would be very helpful. thanks

 

Can you please run this and post the results?

DPC Latency Checker

I know you have already run a latency monitor but this can make it easier to pinpoint.

The last time I remember this happening was on the m17x before the BIOS update fixed it, that was related to the ACPI driver and the BIOS taking to long to respond with a battery status, as well as the nvidia GPU changing clock speeds.

The only thing I can think of is that you forgot to install an official/latest driver somewhere (perhaps chipset?), and windows is using an unoptimised/buggy default one. Just to make sure, have you updated fully with Windows Update? Just trying to narrow the problem down a bit, since it's unusual that a reinstall caused it (it's usually some underlying hardware issue)

Try updating your BIOS as well, it's possible that you have a newer driver off the dell website that was designed for the new BIOS, and if you still have the old BIOS it may act up.

EDIT:

I just had a closer look at the results you already posted, and noticed that the ACPI driver ran for 10.2 ms, which is a HUGE problem (that's 10,200 micro seconds, at most it should be ~2000!)

So again it sounds like a chipset driver issue, make sure you update your bios and chipset.

 

yeah ive got the newest bios (a04) and did all the chipsets etc. off the dell website which is why im so stuck, im out of ideas.

 

just a shot in the dark, did you inadvertently install a sound driver different than the one from dell's website? on my r2 that's the only one that works properly, even the one from realtek's website gave me issues.

you could also check if one of the speakers specifically is going out by panning left or right, i had to replace the right speaker a few months after owning it when it mysteriously died.

 

There have been a few other forum posts about the latency issue here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m11x/555091-dpc-latency-check-your-m11x.html

It's a problem that was rampant on the M17x ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m17x/434691-m17x-dpc-latency.html ), it required the user to manually disable nvidia powermizer (so it ran at 3D clocks constantly), as well as a BIOS update to specifically fix the ACPI issue. I really hope that this is not an underlying hardware problem for the R2, because if it is, you are going to be waiting a while for a fix.

What you can try is disabling any form of Intel speedstep/turbo boost in the bios, as well as disabling nvidia powermizer, just to see if it changes anything.

 

ohhh t read the thread, apparantly its throttlestop causing the spikes. disabled it and works perfectly now, anyone else with this problem just disable throttlestop. apparantly its a problem with the gpu monitoring causing delays. my acpi.sys and tcpip.sys drivers and nvidia drivers are all running perfectly now. thanks a million for the link crozone

 

screencaps of latencymon and dpc checker after removing throttlestop

 

ah yes, the gpu monitoring does in fact cause spikes for me too.