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
    2018-06-01T08:15:11+00:00

    I'm running intel DH77KC, Motherboard and After the Famous Windows !803 Update

    I'm getting Crazy Audio stuttering in my Music DAW .. CPU usage spiking all the time.

    I was praying that someone could Please Help me out, with a solution.. ?

    Thank you so much ….

    Hi RevGreen, 

    You're motherboard is 4 years younger than the ones we've been talking about, and I haven't got anything equivalent to test with.... so take this as a "use at your own risk" disclaimer!

    The DH77KC uses a 7 series chipset and as far as I can see, Intel stopped supporting it in the RST driver after version 14.8.0.1042.  So, if (and that's a big if), this is a similar issue, then you could look at downloading the old RST software here . Make sure you create a restore point / full backup before you install this.

    Any DAW that I've every played are very sensitive to latency, but it can be affected by so many different factors, not least simple quantity of RAM and raw CPU speed.  Since Intel & Microsoft have been producing Meldown/Spectre patches for your generation of hardware, the chances are that the machine has been slowed down significantly in recent months by these security patches... and I notice that there is a microcode BIOS patch for the motherboard here too.

    Good luck and let us know how you get on.

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-06-01T17:13:06+00:00

    Thank you for your response.

    Unfortunately I'm not that good at the Technical aspect of Computers, is it possible that Microsoft tech can help ?

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-06-02T19:57:48+00:00

    Hello JimTheGuru,

    I really feel lucky that I found this post (after 90 minutes of searching and trying various things including downloading the old RealTek driver from Dell's website (of course, nothing helped at all).

    You are a life saver!

    I just downloaded the Intel RST software and rebooted - all problem gone.

    I think this has aslo fixed the lag that I found on my mouse.

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-06-03T08:02:40+00:00

    You're great: solved my HP m9680NL!

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  5. Anonymous
    2018-06-03T09:17:31+00:00

    Some more thanks from me, was pulling my hair out trying to fix this on my Dell Studio XPS 435MT and had restored to rolling back the 1803 update. I installed that this morning, updated the Intel drivers straight away and now my sound is back to normal.

    One again thanks

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