mandarshukla

Hi All,

This is truly a strange problem, i have a oldish PC at home, with VIA vm400 m mobo, with onboard AC 97 sound. Earlier system was working well for movie watching and surfing purpose. I upgraded display to Nvidia 5200 (256 Mb) card, after which i started noticing that my AC 97 would not start up on every boot. The Frequency of sound getting detected reduced gradually over time. At Boot, i know if AC 97 would be available by watching the IRQ allotment done for 'Multimedia device controller. After booting, i dont see AC 97 listed in sound devices, in device manager, neither is there any yellow exclamation mark for unrecognized device.

Then sometimes, just out of blue, on reboot/start, i see my device getting detected and sound coming back.

I have searched this forum for similar threads, but no avail!!

I have tried, resetting BIOS, Enable-disable-enable onboard ac97 etc
removing all devices (graphic card, other USBs etc)
Reinstalling windows xp
event viewer logs

Here is my config:
AMD Athlon 2600 (1.92 Ghz), 512 MB DDR2
VIA 7 VM 400 M mobo, Nvidia 5200 256Mb

I need to know, if i am seeing any conflicts, or mobo's time is just up! if any cheap PCI sound card will help ? Help would be greatly appreciated.

Pauldo

When did you upgrade to sp3?

Also, what you gave as the motherboard is coming up as an Asus board on Google (there was also a reference to a Gigabyte board) and nothing comes up at VIA or VIARENA (their forum). Could you double check the name of that mother board? Did you custom build? Make/Model # will work if you didn't.

Pauldo

mandarshukla

Thanks for the reply Pauldo!
It is a Gigabyte mobo. I had have a windowsxp sp1 disk, which i used for formatting the machine. Even when, just base OS is installed, without any more updates, i do not see 'multimedia controller' getting loaded when machine is booting. Earlier it use to display this device with IRQ being assigned to it. AC97 is on "Auto" in BIOS.

Pauldo

Well there goes that easy fix.

Do you know what your temps are? I doubt you have a southbridge thermal sensor on that board but if your motherboard is hot, maybe your southbridge is burning up.

Maybe try forcing the AC97 in Bios.

Does that motherboard have onboard grahpics? If it does, than you might try removing the graphics card and switching back to it to see what happens.

Of course, pci sound cards are $20 -$30 on the cheap end (with surround sound). It all depends on how much your time is worth :).

Pauldo

mandarshukla

So it appears to be IRQ conflict. If i remove the graphics card, i can see multimedia controller in device pool during bootup and my sound is back.

Now the question is how do i avoid conflict of IRQs for graphics card and ac 97 audio. I have disabled the IRQs for empty PCI slots so that they can be picked up by AC 97 on auto mode. But this is not helping much.

Pauldo, could you please tell me, what the best solution would be in my case ? Are there any alternatives other than buying sound card ?

Pauldo

Is there a setting in Bios to disable onboard graphics? You might have already done this but just covering the bases.

Have you looked into updating your Bios? There have been several revisions since the motherboard first came out.

Pauldo