Alright, I've exhausted all my options. Anyone dealt with the audio crackling/popping in games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Cyberpunk 2077?

Stg-Flame

Diamond Member
Mar 10, 2007
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I've spent the past two hours trying all manners of different things to get this horrendous audio popping glitch in RDR2 to go away but nothing has worked so far. I recall when I first picked up Cyberpunk a year or two ago, I encountered the same issue, but I was able to fix that by simply restarting the game and for some reason it just stopped. Though if it started again while playing, I had to save, quit, then restart the game for it to go away. With RDR2, it just goes from horrible to worse when I restart the game. I know these issues are well documented in both games since it seems to affect a lot of people, but so far nobody knows why this happens or has a concrete fix for any of them.

I'm using a Sennheiser/EPOS GSP 670 wireless headset and there's only two things I haven't been able to try yet. One is getting a USB extension for the dongle to move it away from my PC since someone reported that having a Bluetooth/wifi capable mobo could cause interference but if that were the case, I think I would have experienced this in far more games than just these two. The second option was changing the bitrate of my headset, but for some reason, my headset simply doesn't allow me to change it at all. I've looked at all the guides regarding the GSP 670 and it's stuck at 16 bit 48,000hz DVD Quality with no option to change it. Someone said they were able to uninstall the drivers, put the headset into 7.1 mode, then reinstall different drivers, and that gave them more options, but that makes no sense to me since 2.0 and 7.1 shouldn't have independent drivers nor can I find any information about this.

So, has anyone else ran into any audio crackling issues with certain PC games? Also, I didn't post this in the audio section because this only pertains to these two games. Music, media, movies, every other game, etc. all work flawlessly. It's just these two games that give me trouble, but I'm only trying to play RDR2 right now since my PS4 just died and took all my saves with it.
 

misuspita

Senior member
Jul 15, 2006
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Can't say for sure, but for me things start to crackle and pop in my DAW when the CPU is not enough to process all the bits and then that appears. Raising the buffer size in your sound card solves this
 
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Stg-Flame

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Can't say for sure, but for me things start to crackle and pop in my DAW when the CPU is not enough to process all the bits and then that appears. Raising the buffer size in your sound card solves this
I'll look into doing this after I wake up. I'm running on barely any sleep at the moment. Thanks for the suggestion.
 

Stg-Flame

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Mar 10, 2007
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Can't say for sure, but for me things start to crackle and pop in my DAW when the CPU is not enough to process all the bits and then that appears. Raising the buffer size in your sound card solves this
Nope, didn't work. Someone suggested on Steam that changing the graphics from Vulkan to DX12 fixed the popping for them and it seems to work until a lot of audio files are played at once. I can't pinpoint when it starts again, but it almost always happens in camp when multiple people start talking, during big gun fights, or walking into a crowded area like a bar. I also had one time where I loaded the game and the audio simply worked like with Cyberpunk and didn't have a single issue for two hours. This one is slightly more irritating than Cyberpunk audio glitch because with Cyberpunk, it only took about five seconds to reload the entire game to "fix" the crackling whereas Rockstar makes you go through their shitty launcher regardless if you're using Steam.
 

VirtualLarry

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Sounds like a driver bug, but anyways, is this the onboard audio on a higher-end board, that is connected by USB3.0 interface internally, rather than PCI-E x1? Some boards on AM5 are like that; I'm not a fan of that sort of config.
 
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Stg-Flame

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Yes, it's the onboard via USB 3.0 and the software that EPOS uses offers very little for tweaking or optimization. It basically just has four different sound profiles to choose from and then a 2.0/7.1 switch that honestly sounds like shit in 7.1. This is hands down the worst headset I've used for gaming but probably the best I've used for music, but considering Sennheiser were the top for music equipment, it doesn't really surprise me.
 

Zenoth

Diamond Member
Jan 29, 2005
5,198
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I'm not experiencing any audio cracking and/or popping in games. Now the stuff below will most likely not help but... just in case, I'll take the time to share.

I do, however, experience audio popping when watching (and well, listening) to YouTube videos. Not 100% of the videos, mind you. But a good number of them will have a relatively low 'pop' effect that mostly occurs in my headset's earphones (for some reason, mostly on the right side earphone, occasionally on the left, but never seems to be in both at the same time), and it is regular in those videos where it happens, maybe every 5 to 6 seconds I'll hear a low noise 'pop'. It doesn't have to be music videos, sometimes it's just a playthrough of a game, or some documentary with mostly narration.

I'm suspecting that - at least when it comes to YouTube videos - it will cause that 'popping' effect only based perhaps on the Audio codecs / compression used by the video's author (or perhaps caused by auto-compression by YouTube, not sure how it works as I haven't uploaded anything on YouTube myself in about 15+ years). Now I mention this because I have also tried to fix that problem, but any "solution" I found usually revolves around guides telling people they should uninstall/reinstall their browser, clean their cache, try a different browser, clean up the audio card if it's an actual PCI card (not the case for me anymore), and of course tempering around the Windows' own audio settings (sampling rate, audio diagnostics, etc). And none of the guides I found on the subject ever fixed it. So my assumption now is simply that it is caused by the codecs and/or compression methods used by the authors.

Now, when it comes to games, I am not experiencing anything like that at all (which immediately eliminates my headset as a potential source of the problem). I can say though, that I am simply using my Motherboard's own integrated audio (X670E-F so that's SupremeX 7.1 HD CODEC ALC4080 in my case). I'm exclusively using a headset though, I'm not using any speakers for my PC use, at all. I do have integrated Monitor speakers though, but that's irrelevant to the subject (just saying I don't use any speakers at all, only headset for everything). The only thing I've done in Windows Audio settings was to make sure that the Windows Audio volume is not set to 100% since it's just way too much for headsets (otherwise I get my ears blasted especially when I launch games with all those various company screen logos and their accompanying loud noises and effects which are full-blast volume by default).

So my Windows Audio bar is set to 85% and the Sampling rate is the usual 48K Hz at 16-bits. And in addition to that I simply disabled any other detected Audio devices in the Playback tab (Settings > System > under 'Advanced' > More audio settings > Playback tab on the new opened window, in that list I disabled every other devices I don't need). And in Device Manager, made sure that what is detected is what I use, and only that. And that's all I did. But yeah, the relatively-common YouTube videos audio popping issue never went away (even though it's not present in all videos). I'm just glad I don't get any audio issues in my games.

I do recall that one of the guides I read said that some 'aggressive' Auto OC features in recent CPUs in the past couple of years could sometimes (under very specific conditions, especially related to voltages or sudden 'bursts' of frequencies) cause audio-related issues. But I haven't been OC'ing past Auto OCs on my CPUs since so long I can't even remember the last actual CPU I manually OC'ed on. All I know is since I went with Ryzen back around 2016 or so everything has been smooth in terms of what it's supposed to do automatically (in terms of frequencies and voltages I mean, no over-heating or auto-shutdowns or anything of the likes in that regard).
 
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StoleitfromKilgore

Junior Member
Apr 15, 2024
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Hey, a little late, but I have started to run into various sound issues in recent times with a number of games.

First, regular audio popping in Industria and then later Boltgun. Turning off unused audio devices resolved this for me. At least with Boltgun. I didn't think of it before while playing Industria.

More problematically as I never found a real solution for it: Audio crackling/distortion in Cyberpunk 2077 and in almost exactly the same way also in Generation Zero.

I was able to do one playthrough of Cyberpunk as something "clicked" after I turned off Bluetooth and the basically constant crackling went away for most of the time. It was still there during heavier engagements and it would also show up when there were more people around, like in Marketplaces. Otherwise pedestrians and cars were turned to low because of massive performance impact. But those Marketplaces were still comparatively lively. Crackling in combat encounters was less predictable from what I remember.

I later came back to the game again and nothing I have tried has helped this time around, neither on 1.63 nor 2.00. It usually only shows up after ten minutes or so. Before that the sound is clean. After that it's always there. Turning off Bluetooth by itself doesn't seem to resolve whatever the issue is.
 
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Stg-Flame

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For Cyberpunk I kept restarting the game until the main menu was free of distortion which would fix the audio for that session, but it's incredibly difficult to tell on RDR2 when the distortion is going to start. It's guaranteed to start when there is a lot of heavy bass (like when I'm near a train) but it's completely random outside of heavy bass events. I was fishing with only mild crackling and suddenly all the audio just went to shit with no new audio occurring.

I bought a new wired headset that should be here later today and I'm going to see if it's the Bluetooth. Many people on Steam have suggested the same thing about Bluetooth causing issues and honestly, I really don't like my GSP 670s for gaming. With them being Bluetooth I'll probably just use them for music while I'm working out if the new wired headset is any good. The best headset I ever had was a Razer Tiamat 7.1 that lasted me almost eight years before they finally broke from heavy usage and unfortunately they are no longer sold anywhere so I went with a Razer Kraken 7.1. Hopefully it'll be just as good as the Tiamat, if not better.

I'll do more testing tonight if the new headset arrives and update this accordingly.
 

StoleitfromKilgore

Junior Member
Apr 15, 2024
2
2
6
Unfortunately there seems to be no discernible pattern and I have seen so many solutions suggested that supposedly help, that I don't have the slightest suspicion what it might be. The problem seems to have been around for quite a few people for multiple patch versions. Oftentimes pcgamingwiki is helpful, but for Cyberpunk it only has the common suggestion to change the audio output quality.

I have been using Audio-Technica ATH-M50x headphones, but the problem seems to be persistent across headphones, speakers and so on.
 
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Stg-Flame

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Mar 10, 2007
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Well, wired headphones fixed the issue in both Red Dead Redemption and Cyberpunk. I restarted Cyberpunk 20 times and every time the audio had zero popping, crackling, or distortion. With RDR2 I pretty much found as many trains as I could and went out of my way to use nothing but explosives and get into massive shootouts in towns and there wasn't a single hint of cracking or popping.
 
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Well, wired headphones fixed the issue in both Red Dead Redemption and Cyberpunk. I restarted Cyberpunk 20 times and every time the audio had zero popping, crackling, or distortion. With RDR2 I pretty much found as many trains as I could and went out of my way to use nothing but explosives and get into massive shootouts in towns and there wasn't a single hint of cracking or popping.

I know you already found a solution.
But i do like to share this with you.

Although i am not certain if the information on this page is the same for Windows 10 and windows 11.
It provides some useful information :
Anyway, the page shows some pretty hard to brain digest information but it gives a clue that a fully loaded cpu or saturated memory bus can cause audio dropouts over bluetooth.
Because the cpu also has to spend some processing time for the bluetooth stack besides all the other tasks and the game engine processes.

This is an educated guess :
Obviously, your pc is running on maximum if either the bluetooth stack is unable to keep up or the audio section of the game-engine is unable to keep up or even the usb driverstack is unable.
Any of this or a combination can cause dropouts in the amount of bluetooth packets send to your gamer headphones.

But it is always good to first check with wired headphones to rule out if either the bluetooth stack is problematic or the connection between the bluetooth usb dongle or the bluetooth stack.
When you checked with the wired headset, you kind of verified that the audio section of the game engine is fine and the (Digital to Audio Converter) audio codec is fine.
If you really want to play the game with your GSP 670 gamer headset, you also might try a different usb port on a separate host controller.

Sometimes plugging the usb bluetooth dongle directly into a separate USB XHCI host controller might alleviate the crackling sound and popping since usb is a shared star like topology.
This is because usb is a system that works by letting the XHCI usb host controller polling hubs and devices, and the more devices there are, the more usb traffic there is.
So giving a possible free XHCI usb host controller a single usb device, the bluetooth usb dongle. It might help and you can enjoy the GSP 670 gamer headset. You could give it a try.
See the image below.

There is a great program to check hardware devices on your pc. It is called SIV (System Information Viewer).
It is free to use but after using and you are happy with the program : If you give a couple of dollars or euros or pounds (Whatever currency you like ) for donation. You make the programmer very happy.



USB devices tree :




SIV example picture showing USB devices and ports and distribution :

 
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Stg-Flame

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Mar 10, 2007
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Anyway, the page shows some pretty hard to brain digest information but it gives a clue that a fully loaded cpu or saturated memory bus can cause audio dropouts over bluetooth.
Because the cpu also has to spend some processing time for the bluetooth stack besides all the other tasks and the game engine processes.
I was able to eliminate the CPU being the culprit by tweaking the settings down to the lowest as well as utilizing the Latency option in RDR2 that was specifically added for PC users who were experiencing this issue on lower-end systems. It was one of my first guesses as well after looking around and seeing people say that CPU-intensive games can distort the audio when using headphones and both Cyberpunk and RDR2 are very heavy on the CPU.

For the rest I'll definitely look into it as the new headphones have a vastly different sound profile that I'm still trying to tweak to get to my liking. They are basically pure bass with very muddled treble whereas my GSP 670s sounded perfect for movies and listening to dialogue in games. I know I can tweak it down to a happy medium, but they're both sitting next to my PC and I'd like the option to just flip it over to the GSPs if I decide to watch a movie.
 
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I was able to eliminate the CPU being the culprit by tweaking the settings down to the lowest as well as utilizing the Latency option in RDR2 that was specifically added for PC users who were experiencing this issue on lower-end systems. It was one of my first guesses as well after looking around and seeing people say that CPU-intensive games can distort the audio when using headphones and both Cyberpunk and RDR2 are very heavy on the CPU.

For the rest I'll definitely look into it as the new headphones have a vastly different sound profile that I'm still trying to tweak to get to my liking. They are basically pure bass with very muddled treble whereas my GSP 670s sounded perfect for movies and listening to dialogue in games. I know I can tweak it down to a happy medium, but they're both sitting next to my PC and I'd like the option to just flip it over to the GSPs if I decide to watch a movie.
Could you do me a favor to test your headphones ?
Setup :

Place your smartphone at the same location as the usb port, on which you connected the bluetooth dongle.
Do not connect the usb bluetooth dongle.
And let your headphones connect to your smartphone and sit in your game chair.
Play a song on your smartphone.
Then start the game and just play the game and see if you also have problems in the bluetooth RF signal reception of your headphones.

The reason i ask this, is there may be something interfering with your bluetooth signal, causing problems in the RF signal reception.
If the music remains ok, it might be your usb bluetooth dongle.
Try to replaced that. And test again.

Do you have a microwave in the vicinity that was active at the time when the crackling started ?
The casing of your pc , is it fully closed ?
The personal computer has components at a high frequency which may interfere with the bluetooth signal.

Can you test the combination bluetooth usb dongle + headset on another pc ?

If you do all these tests meticulously and store the results in a calcsheet or excel sheet, you may find a pattern and a cause resulting perhaps in the root cause.
 
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Stg-Flame

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Could you do me a favor to test your headphones ?
Setup :

Place your smartphone at the same location as the usb port, on which you connected the bluetooth dongle.
Do not connect the usb bluetooth dongle.
And let your headphones connect to your smartphone and sit in your game chair.
Play a song on your smartphone.
Then start the game and just play the game and see if you also have problems in the bluetooth reception of your headphones.

It'll likely have to be on my next days off. I usually just jump on my PC after work to check e-mails or wind down with an indie game for thirty minutes before I go to bed. But in the meantime...

Do you have a microwave in the vicinity that was active at the time when the crackling started ?
Nope. PCs are downstairs. Kitchen is upstairs with no appliances running anywhere. Closest appliance is my washer and dryer and even those are a few rooms away.

The casing of your pc , is it fully closed ?
Yep.

Can you test the combination bluetooth usb dongle + headset on another pc ?
Already did that when I was originally having issues with my PSU after I built this PC which was around the same time that I was playing Cyberpunk. I didn't play very much on my old PC but the audio issues persisted to my old PC as well.

The weird part is that this only happens with these two games. I played Dying Light 2 which also requires a really good CPU to run maxed out and I had no issues at all. Fallout 4 can become CPU heavy with a lot of mods and never had even the slightest distortion there. However, the moment I loaded Cyberpunk and RDR2, it was horrendous crackling/popping and everything was distorted - sound, music, dialogue, everything sounded like it was partially underwater. But as I said above, I could fix the issue on Cyberpunk by simply restarting the game until the sound just worked and I would usually have no issues for hours of playing. I wasn't so lucky with RDR2 as it seemed to only get worse the more I restarted the game.
 
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These two are GPU heavy games. Any chance you could pick up some really cheap card, like a 3050 6GB or Intel ARC A380 and test with that? You will be using the lowest graphics settings to test but if the crackling stops, it might be some disruption caused by the electrical components on your 3090 Ti.
 
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The weird part is that this only happens with these two games. I played Dying Light 2 which also requires a really good CPU to run maxed out and I had no issues at all. Fallout 4 can become CPU heavy with a lot of mods and never had even the slightest distortion there. However, the moment I loaded Cyberpunk and RDR2, it was horrendous crackling/popping and everything was distorted - sound, music, dialogue, everything sounded like it was partially underwater. But as I said above, I could fix the issue on Cyberpunk by simply restarting the game until the sound just worked and I would usually have no issues for hours of playing. I wasn't so lucky with RDR2 as it seemed to only get worse the more I restarted the game.

Could you do me a favor and check these settings ?
Long ago, i found out by traversing the internet that these for a desktop pc useless settings can cause rare totally random crashes or other weird issues :




The settings as shown are recommended as they should be. It works for my system great and also for many other happy pc users.
So turn off PCI-e power saving and turn off USB power saving.
These settings can be a rare cause of deadlocks or something i am not aware of resulting in a system hang up.
I know that with at least embedded linux systems, these options are not even supported, because there is no real world advantage.
This was the situation a few years ago, i do not know the present consensus when it comes to linux kernels though.
Another good person who is very fond of linux and also does programming in several languages for linux systems as an honest every day living, and I discovered this together that at that time embedded linux does not seem to support these settings.
Highly likely because there is no real world advantage versus complexity of the software. But that is just a guess on my part. I am not a linux expert.

But perhaps these power saving settings in windows cause weird delays as well on some systems.
Perhaps with those games you mentioned, Cyperpunk 2077 and RDR2 these problems arise for some reason.
No crashes but problems with audio ? Just guessing.

of course, you are not overclocking while having these issues right ?



EDIT: Added images as real images and not as url, url does not function when not logged in.
 
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of course, you are not overclocking while having these issues right ?
That's a good point. Some mobos may slightly OC the CPU when XMP is turned on. So turning off XMP and manually tuning the RAM to run at the same speed as the XMP one could be another thing to try.
 
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I had to readup on DPC latency because i have been very busy the last few years and forgot a lot of computer tech terminology and OS terminology, like for example DPC latency. Forgive me i start to mention things that seem obvious to you.

This seems to be a good read for em at least :

This seems also to be a good read for me at least:
 
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That's a good point. Some mobos may slightly OC the CPU when XMP is turned on. So turning off XMP and manually tuning the RAM to run at the same speed as the XMP one could be another thing to try.
This is always the first thing to do.
Also keep in mind that the PCI-express ports, are very allergic for overclocking.
Because the PCI-e ports need to be impedance calibrated for proper signal propagation (think transmissionline behavior , signal reflection) especially on those high frequencies that PCI-e uses. Like PCI-e 2.0 and higher.
And may be a cause also in DPC latency issues. Perhaps like a driver desperately trying to keep the data flowing while experiencing massive data corruption and trying to resend PCI-e packets.
Causing increased delays because of data that needs to be resend. I am just doing an assumption here based on experience with PCI-e hardware development...

A little background information :

See post #34
Small excerpt from the text :
"
Never touch the PCI-express pins as these are ESD sensitive and the PCIexpress pins are impedance tuned during training of the PCI express links. Training is like testing and tuning for making the almost perfect electrical path for the data to pass over to. So, touching these pins may result in ESD damage and therefore reducing PCIexpress performance. PCI express is to a degree fault tolerant and will sent those PCIe datapackages again when CRC is wrong because of datacorruption. And every time a datapacket needs to be resend, is a reduction in useful databandwidth or PCIe bandwidth will happen because now the same packets needs to be send more often instead of only one time for each packet. Think, weird stuttering behavior or lower fps than possbile in almost worst case scenario. Worst case scenario is of course : no image.

One PCIExpress link is in a way a sort of, very fast RS485 line (A differential serial dataline (data+ & data-) and with an OSI layer on top of it. Similar to TCP/IP has CRC checks and USB has CRC checks. USB is also a differential serial link with an osi layer on top of it.

Also make sure the slot is clean an no copper swarfs are present on the pins as these can create short circuits. And burn out the motherboard and gpu.

CRC = "A cyclic redundancy check (CRC) is an error-detecting code commonly used in digital networks and storage devices to detect accidental changes to digital data. Blocks of data entering these systems get a short check value attached, based on the remainder of a polynomial division of their contents. On retrieval, the calculation is repeated and, in the event the check values do not match, corrective action can be taken against data corruption." Like sending the data again after not acknowledging the received corrupt data.

"
 
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Let us dive for once very deep in the matter :

Some might say, why does this happen with some games and not all games ?
Because perhaps these games might have been written in such an efficient way that these games really push the boundaries of the system by fully making use of the system capabilities, AKA maxing out the system capabilites.
Just read up on how game profiler software (often written and owned by the game engine designer) works and how gpu profiler software works. See website link below for more explanations.

To make sure the system hardware resources are saturated to full use without having a chance to remain momentary idle.
Momentary idle meaning the hardware has nothing to do for a moment.
And remember that all those calculations cost electrical power. Causing current to flow, not as a steady electrical current, but as an electrical steady current with bouncing spikes on top of that electrical steady current.
And that those bouncing spikes in power consumptions by gpu cards and the CPU itself may result in crosstalk interference, extra reflections with PCI-e signals, ground bounce effects for high speed digital drivers.
And therefore signal corruption and therefore data corruption and therefore packets resend and worst case system crashes because the driver is fed up with it and madly yells at the OS : "I quit , this is undoable ! "..
And that is something that always must be prevented. Because the OS is then unable to provide what the human users requested : Flawless proceding of the game for the full immersion of the gamer.

All this information to explain why the motherboards are designed with given specifications and specified clock frequencies and specified clock signal levels : To keep the system stable under all CPU load conditions and all GPU load conditions. May that be separately or combined which of course is usually the case.


With respect to the previous post #20 :
Small excerpt form the text :
"
Your system appears to be having trouble handling real-time audio and other tasks. You are likely to experience buffer underruns appearing as drop outs, clicks or pops. One or more DPC routines that belong to a driver running in your system appear to be executing for too long. Also one or more ISR routines that belong to a driver running in your system appear to be executing for too long. One problem may be related to power management, disable CPU throttling settings in Control Panel and BIOS setup. Check for BIOS updates.
LatencyMon has been analyzing your system for 0:58:18 (h:mm:ss) on all processors.
"
This can be a result when PCI-e packets constantly needs to be resend because of CRC corruption and impedance mismatch (think transmissionline behavior , signal reflection) because of overclocking.
Just an educated guess.
Also notice that that program called Latencymon perhaps may be be a good option to try to find the culprit.
I am not sure that is a good option but when tracking down these kinds of issues, one has to start somewhere, right !

Some background information :
First know that overclocking is never garantueed. If the stability of the system while overclocking was guaranteed, the system would be sold at that higher clock as default and of course with a premium price.
Simple marketing techniques 101 !


So always first set the system to default clocks and search on the motherboard manufacturer forums, about any clock generator issue in bios settings and that perhaps a new bios update is released or that a setting needs to be changed in the bios or the registry, to mention something.

I am doing this from knowledge from memory based on my general electronic hardware design experience, so bare with me.
Why do i keep continuing about PCI-e and not just DDRx memory ?
Where x = DDR revision number.

Sometimes the internal clock generators on the motherboard are coupled to each other with fixed dividers.
The more complex clock generators have integer dividers for the separate clock outputs and what is even better : Fractional dividers for higher precision. This all to be able to generate the right clock frequency.
So if one overclocks, all these clocks might be a little off with motherboards containing clock generators with fixed dividers or integer dividers.

One might say, what does it matter ?
Well, those copper traces on the motherboard are designed and layed out to be optimal for a given (specified) signal with given (specified) amplitude and at a given (specified) frequency by letting these traces have a given (specified) impedance.
These specifications are set by the PCI-SIG, AKA Peripheral Component Interconnect Special Interest Group.
But there are also PCI-e connectors, also having impedance but if you look at the complete system as (impedance change) hops (shown as unordered list) :
  • From CPU-die,
  • to cpu package,
  • to connector,
  • to motherboard copper traces,
  • to PCI-e connector,
  • to PCI-e card pcb board pins,
  • to copper traces,
  • to for example GPU package,
  • to GPU die.
All of this is designed to have as less impedance jumps per hop as possible and still the impedance jumps are there.
So the whole system is specified to be able to cope with all these physical physics constraints and of course to a degree external influences, when following the specifications.

And then enthusiast people start overclocking 😲! (Crying motherboard designers and crying PCI-e card designers, crawling in bed hiding under the covers from that evil outside world ! 😭😥). Mama's, wifes, children, dogs, kitties and hamsters desparately trying to give some comfort ( hugs everywhere)...

And why do i talk so much about PCI-e ?
Because it is highly sensitive to mismatches in the clock frequency.
Of course, there is also a sort of southbridge with PCI-e connections.
Just replace the CPU part in the list above for southbridge or northbridge when applicable.
All of this is of course transmission lines basics.
And how knowledge of skew, phase, amplitude, frequency and impedance are so important for proper functioning of digital systems.

See this application note from Texas Instruments, about phase locked loop clock generation and how dividers work and how the phases between different clocks are also important.
I find it already mind boggling.
This also applies to modern computing and of course overclocking :

Excerpt from the pdf datasheet :
"
Phase Locked Loop (PLL) is a fundamental part of radio, wireless and telecommunication
technology. The goal of this document is to review the theory, design and analysis of PLL
circuits. PLL is a simple negative feedback architecture that allows economic
multiplication of crystal frequencies by large variable numbers. By studying the loop
components and their reaction to various noise sources, we will show that PLL is
uniquely suited for generation of stable, low noise tunable RF signals for radio, timing and
wireless applications.
Some of the main challenges fulfilled by PLL technology are economy in size, power and
cost while maintaining good spectral purity.
This document details basic loop transfer functions, loop dynamics, noise sources and
their effect on signal noise profile, phase noise theory, loop components (VCO, crystal
oscillators, dividers and phase detectors) and principles of integer-N and fractional-N
technology. The approach will be mainly heuristic, with many design examples.
"

As an example what ground bounce effects does see :

As an example about gpu profiler software, visit this site :


Some explanation about transmissionlines from professional PCB software manufacturers :



For those interested, a pcb design calculator , also useful for to be able to visualize transmissionline behavior and to keep in mind other pcb design aspects :

 
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