Solved Windows 10 April 2018 Feature Update audio glitches and stuttering on old x58 system

Anonymous
2018-05-01T09:12:36+00:00

This is a bit of a self answering post to save other people the troubleshooting that I've had to do.

I'm on an old system from Dell, where the motherboard and CPU are from an old Studio XPS 435MT.  It's an old (but still managing) Core i7 940 CPU, but the bigger challenge is the ICH10R SATA ACHI / RAID controller.  

To cut a long story short, after upgrading from 1709 to 1803 (via Windows Update), I got horrible audio stuttering on both the built in Realtek system, and an external Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 (2nd gen).  The fact that I had problems on both made me think that the issue was more fundamental than an audio driver issue, and so it proved to be.

It turned out that I had horrific DPC latency issues on what Windows had defaulted to as a storage driver (storport.sys).

After digging a bit, I installed the latest Intel RST driver.  No joy. It was just as bad.

Then I realised that Intel probably dumped support for ICH10R donkey's years ago, and so they did. In fact, they seem to have dropped it back in 2012.

So I uninstalled that, and downloaded Intel RST version 11.7.0.1013 from the Intel download site (thankfully it is still there).  This is the last version of the driver with support for ICH10R as far as I can see.

After installing this version, the audio problems are gone, or as good as gone. The latency on storport.sys is nominal again.

I just hope saves someone else the troubleshooting nightmare. Intel have left us poor people that are milking the last life out of the first gen Core CPUs high and dry with regards to Meltdown and Spectre patches, and the performance has been badly impacted by few patches that have released... but at least this might let us keep the old ICH10R chugging along a bit longer!

Windows for home | Windows 10 | Install and upgrade

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  1. Anonymous
    2018-08-22T13:57:32+00:00

    Please let us know how it went with version 13.x. I am on version 11.x and a couple of times I had issue in shutting down the 435MT, but that seems to be not happening anymore (the computer keeps getting updates each month, so it becomes hard to control what goes in every now-and-then.

    I still intend to use 435MT for another 1 year (current GPU seems to be dying and it is hard to get a decent GPU at a decent price - without upgrading the powersupply and getting a better case.)

    And if you manage to form a club somewhere, count me in. :)

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-08-22T08:21:30+00:00

    Thanks Howie and good luck! I think that if there were a club, I wouldn't be allowed in. The only parts of my MT that are still from the original machine are the motherboard and CPU.

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-08-22T04:31:03+00:00

    Dell Studio XPS 435mt here, too. i7 920. 24GB RAM, system is on a 2TB RAID-1 array. Original system purchased via a great deal Costco had way back when.

    Currently on Windows 10 Pro v1709 build 16299.611.

    I noticed over the past few months that the update to 1803 kept failing to install -- for better or for worse -- but I never had time to figure out why and get it installed.

    After the most recent Windows updates I started experiencing the problem as well with audio stuttering and the system freezing up every few seconds due to terrible DPC latency issues, with storport.sys reported as the main culprit by LatencyMon. Task Manager would also show the Disk Usage at a constant 100%. I was unaware of LatencyMon and dpclat.exe before embarking on this journey.

    I found your post after LOTS of searching and experimenting in the past few days, including installing the latest version of Intel RST, 16.5.1.1030 to try to address the 100% disk usage issue, which it DID. Alas, it did not it did not fix the audio stuttering and lockups.

    I'm about to attempt to uninstall the newest RST (once I'm done waiting for the restore point which is taking forever) in order to revert to an older RST v13.6.0.1002 as reported working by someone else in this thread. I realize there's some risk that Windows will be unable to read my system drive(s). I'm hoping it does not come to that.

    No matter how this turns out I wanted to THANK YOU in advance for your post. I'm hoping for the best.

    Perhaps there should be a special club (or at least a support group) specifically for those of us who still have the Dell Studio XPS 435mt running (in some form or another) ~10+ years later, which as we all know is an eternity in the technology world. At any reasonable value of our time that we've likely collectively put into keeping these beasts running, it would have been a better move to just buy newer systems... I think we're all gluttons for punishment! But they were *so* good in their day... right? ;-)

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-08-18T15:28:53+00:00

    You're welcome Piloubidou!₩

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  5. Anonymous
    2018-08-18T15:24:50+00:00

    I had the same issue after Windows 10 1803 April update on my Studio XPS 435MT with a SSD hard drive

    Some freezing mouse moves and some audio glitches and stuttering on music and video.

    after installing Rapid Storage Technology ICH9M/ICH10 11.7.0.1013 WHQL 

    everythings fine

    You saved my life ! thank you.

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