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
    2018-07-08T17:33:07+00:00

    Well I'm not really in much of a position to do that Sunil.  I have upgraded the HDDs to an SSD and two HDDs years ago, I have replaced the PSU several times, I've added more RAM, I've upgraded the GPU several times too (now running an ASUS OC GTX1080) and in order to do that, I also replaced the case (because it physically wouldn't fit in the MT case, and because there was definitely not enough airflow in the original).  In essence, the only parts of my 435MT that are still the originals are the motherboard and CPU.  I'm afraid that my next upgrade will finally replace the CPU, motherboard and RAM... maybe for the 10th anniversary of me purchasing it.

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  2. Anonymous
    2018-07-11T19:26:56+00:00

    Thanks for the work-around!

    I did not investigate this issue so when I found a link to this discussion, I just went ahead and did the Intel download.  It worked, thankfully, because the audio/video issue was very annoying!

    Do you, or anyone, know if there was an Intel update included with the April 2018 Microsoft update?  It seems that the latest update did include the latest Intel update, that's why the audio/video issue appeared, correct?

    Just curious as to why the issue arose in the first place.  May be a simple question, but thank you.

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  3. Anonymous
    2018-07-11T19:37:36+00:00

    I installed a SSD for the OS with one HDD for storage a few years ago.  I just reverted back to the above Intel driver with no issues.  Are you saying you can't revert back to fix the audio/video issue because of your current configuration?

    I would like to know exactly what caused the issue to appear in the first place. 

    Just curious.

    I'm running a Dell XPS 435t/9000 with the i7 950.

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-07-11T19:39:35+00:00

    I would like to add that I did a search for an updated Intel driver under Device manager, and through Windows Update; both said I was up to date with the most current driver.  ??

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  5. Anonymous
    2018-07-11T19:41:52+00:00

    Sorry.

    I did not read what you were replying to, it had no relevance to the Intel driver install, oops.

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