Aureal Vortex2 card causing BSoDs on multiple machines \ VOGONS

Aureal Vortex2 card causing BSoDs on multiple machines

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First post, by ElementalChaos

Posted on 2017-02-12, 02:25

ElementalChaos Offline

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I've been having recent issues with my Diamond Monster Sound MX300 card. Unfortunately, the catalyst is totally random, but generally involves when a sound effect or music stream starts playing, though it sometimes happens without any audio. It can happen 30 seconds after I start a game up, or it can take hours. But I will get a BSoD, either Fatal Exception 0E or 0B, with "Fatal Exception 0E at 0028:[random address]" being most common, sometimes it mentions AU30CORE.VXD. Afterwards I always get a black screen and I have to restart. I have also gotten Windows Protection Errors which shut down the computer after pressing a key instead of restarting like (I think) it's supposed to.

I tried multiple driver versions, 2041 and 2048, and on multiple machines, the Pentium MMX 233 and Dell Dimension 4100, and they both have the same issue. I've also tried disabling DirectSound acceleration in the Aureal settings with no effect.

Now although this card is giving issues on both machines, I still am not sure if it is a failure with the card. Maybe the PMMX just doesn't like the card. I will have to do more testing.

Last edited by ElementalChaos on 2017-02-12, 21:04. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 3, by kenrouholo

Posted on 2017-02-18, 01:03

kenrouholo Offline

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try turning off any sort of PCI write caching in the BIOS (don't get your hopes up; this is just a guess). Also check if it's sharing IRQs. Always disable unused stuff in the BIOS like parallel ports, serial ports (at least COM2 if you don't use both), etc. IRQ sharing in theory should be fine but it can be problematic with 9x. Disabling stuff frees up IRQs and increases the chances that it won't be sharing one anymore, and if it still does you can try switching PCI slots.

How do the capacitors on the board look? You can't always tell bad ones visually but sometimes.

Yes, I always ramble this much.

Reply 2 of 3, by ElementalChaos

Posted on 2017-02-23, 01:24

ElementalChaos Offline

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Well, I rearranged the cards in the Dell, reinstalled all drivers and have had no issues since then. It turns out that on this motherboard PCI slot 1 (by extension the AGP slot) and slot 5 share the same IRQ priority, and I had the Vortex plugged into slot 5, which may have been causing issues. Still not sure what was up with the Pentium, I know it was giving me slightly different error messages and would always crash on 3Dmark99.

Reply 3 of 3, by betamax80

Posted on 2017-03-12, 15:23

betamax80 Offline

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I know what the specs say for the Aureal card.... but I wonder if the 233MMX is too low-clocked for it in real world conditions? I'm sure I've read somewhere about a 300mhz CPU for certain portions of the card.

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