New USB DAC - Random popping - High DPC - Topping E30

[Sansui1977]

Following up here, I ended up formating the computer. While the journey of getting the DPC down was fun and was sucesfull, there still was something influencing the sound. High frequency crackles occasionally, most of the popping went away.

Reinstalled OS using MS Windows 10 2004 iso. No Dell crap. Everything was going good until the Windows Store starting downloading Dell bloatware as well as "Maxx audio by Waves". I had to disable the service it created as well as disable the software from starting at boot.

After OS was installed I ran the Windows 10 Decrapifier script (highly recommended, wouldn't use Windows 10 without it): https://community.spiceworks.com/scripts/show/4378-windows-10-decrapifier-18xx-19xx

Latency is about the same but the big diffrence is there are no more artifacts/fuzzness as there was before! Something was influencing the sound (looking at the Maxx Audio). It's very clean, no more stuttering when moving windows. Very happy!

I did not enable a lot of the reg/bcedit changes that were reccomended accross various sites. This is running two VMs and four monitors for over a half hour - Not bad.

Normally you could select the graphics adapter to be used per application in the nVidia control panel app - I haven't had a Win10 machine with Optimus yet though, your Graphics Settings may be the equivalent of that already.

The odd part is that with nVidia graphics active, the system actually ought to be more busy, as PCIe is fired up and used to transfer frame buffer contents from nVidia to Intel graphics (at least that is my understanding of how it should work - my now-dated Latitude E6520 actually seems to be switching between analog video for Intel graphics and TMDS for nVidia, weirdly enough, so they seem to have connections from the panel to both adapters). PCIe also tends to preclude the processor from being able to enter very deep sleep modes, but I mean, you had already tested that.

(BTW, said E6520 generally plays fine, just the WiFi will result in the occasional pop. Not a major issue for either locally stored music - I got a 1 TB SSD for it so it can hold my entire collection - or lossy streams. Battery power consumption when playing music with the screen off is about 5.5 W, for over 12 hours worth of potential play time with the big 9-cell battery. Sandy Bridge was really good back in the day.)

Starting with Windows 2004, Microsoft implemented GPU Scheduling. The nVidia app no longer has this function. Of course in typical MS fasion, it does more harm than good - https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ne...ws-10-2004-gpu-scheduling-to-geforce-drivers/

You are right Sandy bridge was awesome - Was rocking a 3570k Ivy bridge for a long time - Back when Intel was king.