Asus « The Tech Nut

Posts Tagged Asus

History Repeats Itself

May 24

Posted by The Nut in Journal, Tech | 2 Comments

Actually, if you’ve read the A Story series of posts, you wouldn’t need to read further to know what happened.

My graphics card, a trusty (or not) nVidia 6600GT, gave up on me. And, it’s not the first time it’s happened. Sometime in March, I connected my graphics card to my TV, and the GFX card died, albeit without the fizz-bang-boom. This flung me into a month-long battle with the Service Centre at Rashi Peripherals, which distributes XFX cards in India. Again, I won’t go through the entire thing again, partly because it’s emotionally disturbing for me, and also because this post will become the longest ever. Click on the link at the top of the post for the entire series, although in the wrong order, with the last post coming first.

Anyway, this case was quite different. The PC was on, pretty much for a long part of the day, downloading some stuff. My brother then switched on the monitor at around 11 PM to do some work of his. Then, he shut down the PC, and when he started it again after some time, nothing came up on the screen, and the BIOS gave an error message through the PC speaker. It consisted of 4 beeps – 1 long and 3 long. By the way, I own an Asus A8N-E motherboard.

I checked up on the net, and can confirm that this has something to do with my graphics card. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ve had this problem in the past, but it used to go away after taking out and putting in the GFX card again (possibly just a positioning problem). But this time, the problem is persisting. And once or twice, the error didn’t sound, but the display remained blank. Suggestions?

As a result, I won’t be able to post for a while. My other PC, the one my brother has brought back from hostel. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have an Ethernet port for the Internet. But I’ll tell you what all I have posts and pics ready for:

Repairing (taking apart) my portable CD player
My old PC
Bro’s mobile dead
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

Tags: Asus, Hardware, Tips

nVidia v/s Realtek/Asus

Aug 20

Posted by The Nut in Tech | No Comments

You see, I’ve got an Asus A8N-E motherboard, which has integrated audio with the Realtek AC’97 Codec. Now, I was a good boy, and installed the drivers that came originally with the Motherboard CD. The drivers that shipped on it were the ones provided by Realtek. The mixer, was designed by Asus, and trust me it did NOT look nice (or sound nice, as I later found out.)

Half an year later, nVidia released its own driver for the sound chipset (the A8N-E had a nForce 4 chipset). However, I was aghast to find that the nVidia driver did not come bundled with a mixer! Went back to Realtek. Fast-forward another 6 months, and nVidia releases an audio driver with a bundled NvMixer. I was so happy. After installing it, I realised that it had much better quality than the Realtek one.

But then, another couple of months later, I downloaded Process Explorer and noticed that my DPC usage was 5-8% when playing songs. I’m a performance freak and I didn’t like that. I browsed around on the Microsoft SysInternals Forums, and found about a tool called RATTV3, which helps monitor Interrupts and DPCs from different processes. I noticed that some process starting with ‘nv’ was causing problems.

‘nv’ generally stands for nVidia.

I came to the conclusion that one of my nVidia drivers was causing problems (I also own a nVidia 6600GT). I uninstalled all of them and found that the problem was gone. I installed them back, one by one, and when I installed the motherboard drivers (they were all together), the problem began again.

Then I began the painstaking process of uninstalling each of the mobo (read motherboard) drivers, and reinstalling them one by one. When I installed the Audio Driver, the mystery was solved.

I had mixed feelings.

I didn’t feel like uninstalling the NvMixer, It used to enhance bass without distorting it. I was going to miss all that. I uninstalled it for some days, but couldn’t live without it, and today, I am re-installed it, although an older version through the nVidia site, in the hope that my problem will be fixed. Alas, it didn’t work, but who cares.

I’ve got the bass!!!

Tags: Asus, Audio, nVidia, Realtek