Re: Stuttering audio and mouse - PSU fan too slow perhaps?

potatan wrote:
Hi,

I have an ASUS A8V Deluxe mobo, AMD Athlon 64 3500+ in an Antec Sonata
chassis with the supplied PSU. All about 2.5 years old.

Recently I've been experiencing poor mouse response (it seems to
stick, and/or move slowly). Also sounds frequently stutter (including
my startup wave file).

Checking my BIOS, the CPU temp and CPU Fan speed are 68C / 2986. MB
temp is 24C. The power supply fan speed is ~1500 and this displays in
red in my BIOS display.

A. I realise this is a bit like "how long is a piece of string", but
does my PSU fan speed look a bit low?
B. If it is, could this cause the problems I am experiencing with
audio and the mouse?

I have the latest drivers for mouse/audio, and there are no background
processes sapping my CPU (current usage about 1-5%).

All help appreciated.

Thanks.


One thing that comes to mind, is an "interrupt storm". It is possible
for a broken chip to continuously interrupt the processor, leading to
the processor spending a lot of time servicing empty interrupts. That could
prevent timely servicing of other things that need real time service.

In my Win2K install, if I go to the "Administrative Tools", there is
an item called "Performance". That item shows a moving plot with time.
You can right click in the pane, and "Add Counters". There is a list
of statistics to choose from. "Interrupts/sec" is one of them. If
I don't touch my PS/2 keyboard or PS/2 mouse, the "Interrupts/sec"
reads around 130. If I have a 3D game playing, and I alt-tab
out of the game, my interrupts rise to a couple thousand (even though
in my test case, the game was displaying its status screen at the
end of a match). So pick a "quiet" set of conditions, and check
the interrupts per second. If you are using USB keyboard and mouse,
you are going to get a different number than me, and someone with a
USB setup is going to have to contribute their baseline level of
activity.

Another thing that has upset sound in the past, is a disk drive that
goes from DMA to PIO mode. That can prevent "winamp" type applications
from playing music smoothly. PIO means every disk read becomes processor
intensive.

Paul
.

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