Sound issues on msi gaming plus b450m

heavymetal2000

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Oct 28, 2012
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After recently putting together my new desktop I'm having sound and internet connection issues.

My previous pc had lower end parts in it that were 6 years old and I never had buggy sound or internet but my brand new one does.

Issue:
On boot I get a semi loud "pop" noise in my headphones.
I played Pubg on the new pc last night, gunshots, explosions, and most other high impact noises are slightly distorted and cause fuzz in my headphones, I also have what feels like half the volume I had on my other PC and cant hear things from as far away.

Discord now cuts in and out randomly and every 3-6 minutes I get network lag detected in pubg. Again this never happened on the other one.

I downloaded MSIs live update and let it run a scan. It came back that there was no realtek universal audio driver installed, and no Pci-e ethernet driver.

Figured that must be the problem so I installed both but the sound issue and initial pop noise on boot still persists. Haven't had a chance to try pubg for the network lag yet, tonight most likely.

What's my best course of action.
Anyone with an MSI board that can kinda guide me?
Should I strip all audio drivers with ddu and remove the software then clean re install?

Do I need the realtek universal driver as well as the HD Audio driver or just the HD one?

The newest HD audio driver says I need Nahimic 3 and I currently have nahimic 2, needs to be updated in windows app store?

I do have the mobo CD but i built this with no optical drive as i wanted a case that didnt support one.

Anyways, any help is appreciated, i have decent general computer sense but i wont take offense to layman's terms, the easier it is to understand what you're saying the better.

Thank you!
 
I'd try to get back to basics as you may have some conflicts.

First, download the latest audio driver from the MSI website for your motherboard. Do not use the MSI motherboard utilitities, especially their Live Update utility, to do this. In fact, uninstall the LiveUpdate utility. It's actually DANGEROUS to use it to update BIOS.

Uninstall Nahimic completely.

Uninstall all audio drivers and utilities that you can then reboot. Upon rebooting Windows10 will probably install and run audio on it's default Realtek drivers then; which should work well enough but the sound manager is featureless.

Install the latest MSI audio driver for your motherboard; again DO NOT INSTALL MSI's LIVE UPDATE to do this! The driver you downloaded earlier will be a self-installing package so you don't need it.

Don't install universal drivers from Realtek. While they work well the Sound Manager utility MSI provides with their drivers is much better.

If you get this working well enough only then try installing Nahimic, the latest version downloaded from MSI's support web site. I never use it, not even sure what it does but it sounds gimicky and I really prefer a purer sound than gimicky.
 

heavymetal2000

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Ok, I did the bios flash via usb in the bios menu and it worked properly from what I can tell. Updated the version, ram went to mostly proper speed etc...

I'll get msi's hd audio drivers tonight and try a complete remove/install.
Just so I'm sure, the driver package that is approx 250-300mb is the one I want correct?
Not the 33mb universal.

Hopefully this works, I'll report back after work if this solves the issue.
Thank you for the reply.

Edit:
As for Nahimic, I personally prefer gaming in stereo and have no issues determining right from left on 2 channel sound. I just use a nice pair of stereo sennheiser stereo headphones.
But on the msi website it says the newest drivers require updating nahimic to V3.
Whether that's necessary for the driver, or simply means that V2 wont work with the newer drivers so you need V3 if you want to use it I'll have to look into.

Edit2:
As for the pci-e ethernet driver, that only applies to ethernet adapters that are in a pci-e slot right? Not the onboard ethernet slot?
If I'm having internet connection issues I should be able to wipe certain drivers pertaining to the onboard one and get those from msi as well right?
 


I'd get the larger download...Realtek High Def Audio Driver....because that probably includes the Sound Manager utility. You'd want that.

The LAN controller uses the PCIe bus even though it's not attached using a slot, instead it is wired directly to the bus. So yes, I'd still install it. Uninstall any drivers you have already, if you can. But again, when you reboot after uninstalling them Windows will install it's default drivers.

One thing to do...open up device manager (type Device Manager in the Cortana search box). Look for any hardware devices with a problem, uninstall them and let Windows re-install it on re-boot. You can also right click on devices...like audio devices, LAN devices and System devices... then click on Update Device Driver. It will go out and search MS for WHQL Certified drivers for the device and offer to install it if it's later. That provides basic functionality, with no fancy management or control utility, but almost always works well.

First though...did you install the AMD chipset drivers? That's probably a good idea to do if you haven't.
 

heavymetal2000

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I did browse the device manager quickly before I went to sleep last night but not thoroughly. I'll definitely look into it more tonight and see if there are any flags.

Now that you mention it I cant recall if I did install the updated amd chipset package.
I know for a fact I installed adrenalin I think it's called? And then I updated my gpu driver from radeon to the newest one.
But I may not have done the chipset one if that's possible.

If I did miss that is there anything I should uninstall prior to implementing that update or can I just go ahead and run the install?

 



At this point, with all fresh driver installs and assuming you've eliminated any conflicting or old drivers.

If internet is just 'slow' that's far more likely to be something your ISP is causing or maybe the local network integrity to your computer. And when you say 18%, of what baseline. 18% of gigabit speed (your LAN interface's maximum capacity) or of your ISP's advertised speed? What is your router's maximum speed? People rarely if ever see the full gigabit speed of their computer's LAN interface mostly since not many purchase that much bandwidth. And of those who do many don't realize they have a 100Mbps router in their local network so 90% of that capacity is going to waste. And lastly comes cable problems: for gigabit you really need quality CAT5E or CAT6 and many people have older CAT5 drop cables they persist in using.. or worse, CAT4 which are dirt cheap at Microcenter.

Sound scratchiness can be bad connections: try removing front panel audio connections entirely and using just the rear panel. Many people operate this way to avoid just these problems, btw. If the sound problems disappear, then the front panel connections are at fault; could be your case or the pin connectors to the motherboard. If it persists go back to your motherboard's installation: double check all standoff screws to make sure they are securely tight and that all mounting holes have both a screw and a standoff underneath.




 

heavymetal2000

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I finally got it! Man drivers are finicky.
I used AMDs driver tool to completely remove all traces of drivers and also ended up rolling windows all the way back to the day I freshly installed it.

Re installed chipset drivers ,ryzen master, and adrenalin individually, then the pci-e drivers.
For the sound, after hours of google I found on an amd forum that my setup does not play well with realteks HD audio drivers that I was using.
Instead I used a particular version of the universal audio driver which installs in the device manager as "Realtek(R)" instead of "realtek HD audio driver".
I grabbed nahinimic 3 as an audio manager instead and it seems to be working.
I'll test it more tonight but so far it's working for my internet speed as well as sound.

In regards to what you mentioned about internet speeds, I'm in a small rural community where we only have 6gb and 10gb DSL available and its ridiculously overpriced as its essentially monopolized due to no companies spending money on newer infrastructure due to community size.
I have the 6gb package which regularly performs between 5 and 6gb on speed test but yesterday I was lucky to get .5mb on a speed test.

It's been good so far though.

Thanks for all the help!