P4P800 Deluxe sound is pretty bad?

I just bought the P4P800 Deluxe. I've not tried using Windows yet. I'm just
using linux (2.4.20). And my BIOS settings are pretty much the default
settings. I've not overclocked or anything just yet. I've disabled the
RAID, since I'm not using it. I've not messed with anything else in
the BIOS.

I was able to get both the 3Com ethernet and the AC'97 linux drivers from
the asus website. They compiled and installed flawlessly. The ethernet
runs just fine, no complaints here. But the on-board sound is just
phenomenally poor. Is it supposed to be this bad?

I downloaded the sound driver version 0.9.1 dated 2003/05/23, by the way.

I use xmms to play an mp3. I occasionally get interference from the
harddrive (I think). It actually causes it to synthesize a different
sound. In other words, it's not just added background noise or hissing.
That's pretty inexcusable right there. Maybe it's because I'm connecting
the CD-ROM audio output to the motherboard, and it's picking up EMI? Still,
I did that with my previous motherboard (Soyo dragon), and it worked
just fine without the distortion.

I made the mistake of turning the volume up to 100% in xmms (it has a little
volume slider in the GUI). Doing that results in high-volume distortion
(the op-amp is acting as a limiter circuit I believe). That's to be
expected I suppose, but it didn't happen on my last motherboard.

Also, when the CPU is busy past about 50% load, it causes the sound to
pause and turn choppy. I'm running a Pentium 4 2.6GHz with twin corsair
low-latency 3200 256MB rams. Is the sound driver that bad that it needs
more than 2.6GHz in order to work well?? I didn't have this problem with
my previous motherboard and I used an Athlon 1.4GHz CPU.

I'm pretty disappointed with the sound. If this is the way it's supposed
to be, I can't believe they even bothered putting sound on the motherboard.

Maybe I just need to flash a new bios or make some BIOS settings changes?
I wonder if the Windows sound drivers are any better?

Oh, one other thing, I noticed something weird in Linux. When I was
untarring a gzipped 25MB+ file (the linux kernel distribution), it actually
froze my mouse pointer temporarily while it wrote to the disk. Is disk
operation on the P4P800 suppose to do this? I didn't notice any problems
with my previous motherboard / CPU. It was pretty smooth. It's not real
bad now, but I wasn't expecting anything like that. I'm not using SCSI,
by the way. Just IDE.

Well, if the consensus of opinion is that on-board sound on this thing is
real bad and I'm not just missing some magic settings, then I suppose I'm
buying a sound card for this thing.

Steve

sthemage wrote:
I just bought the P4P800 Deluxe. I've not tried using Windows yet. I'm just
using linux (2.4.20).
I was able to get both the 3Com ethernet and the AC'97 linux drivers from
the asus website. They compiled and installed flawlessly. The ethernet
runs just fine, no complaints here.

The sk98lin driver is already part of the kernel, but it's an older
version which doesn't yet support the 3C940. However, you can get a
patch against the 2.4.21 kernel from SysKonnect's website which is a
newer version than 3Com's standalone driver from Asus.

But the on-board sound is just phenomenally poor. Is it supposed
to be this bad?

No. Runs just fine on my computer (P4P800, in both Linux 2.4.21 and
Windows).

I downloaded the sound driver version 0.9.1 dated 2003/05/23, by the way.

Try 0.9.5 from http://www.alsa-project.org/.

I use xmms to play an mp3. I occasionally get interference from the
harddrive (I think). It actually causes it to synthesize a different
sound. In other words, it's not just added background noise or hissing.
That's pretty inexcusable right there. Maybe it's because I'm connecting
the CD-ROM audio output to the motherboard, and it's picking up EMI?

I don't think so; in that case, you _would_ get added noise/hissing.

Oh, one other thing, I noticed something weird in Linux. When I was
untarring a gzipped 25MB+ file (the linux kernel distribution), it actually
froze my mouse pointer temporarily while it wrote to the disk. Is disk
operation on the P4P800 suppose to do this?

No. Apparently, you do not have DMA enabled, which is sloooow, and
disables all interrupts during disk accesses. The 2.4.20 kernel
doesn't yet know about the ICH5 IIRC, so please try upgrading to
2.4.21.


HTH
Clemens