[kwlug-disc] How to choose a new motherboard UPDATED!

[Darcy Casselman]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 11:41 PM, Darcy Casselman <dscassel at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I bought a motherboard!  An ASUS Z97-A.
>
> http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132118&ignorebbr=1
>
 ...

> Anyway, long story short, I still have a lot of questions about whether
> this was the best purchase, but I'm hopeful it's a good one.


So, anyway, I got the motherboard, CPU and put it all in my old case.

I booted up and all three monitors came up without any fuss, which has
never happened for me.  Awesome!  This is great!

Then I tried to play game.

Apparently the current snd_intel_hda ALSA drivers don't like H97 and Z97
chipsets.  The sound was crackly and distorted.

I've spent more than a few hours over the last week hunting around for a
fix.  I installed Windows on a spare harddrive to make sure it wasn't a
hardware problem (for which I needed to spend the $20 to get a SATA DVD
drive so I could run the Windows driver disk to actually get actual video,
networking and sound support :P).  And I found this thing on the Arch WIki (
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio#Glitches.2C_skips_or_crackling)
which, while not fixing the problem, did actually make it worse, leading me
to conclude there was some sort of sound driver/pulseaudio problem.

Top tip: when trying to sort out sound driver problems for specific
hardware the best thing to do is search for the hardware product id (in my
case "8ca0").  That's how I found this:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1321421

Hurray!  The workaround works great and now I'm back in business!

Thought you'd like to know. :)
Darcy.
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