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hi guys
I am experiencing very annoying sound dropouts and high pitch noises with my 828 MK3. This issue has been present since I bought the 828 MK3.

I think the problem became worse since I updated the 828 bios to v1.06
I have read somewhere that there are issues with the firewire drivers of win7. I rolled back to the legacy drivers as suggested by MOTU (win xp) with no success. The dropouts are still there.
I did a fresh installation of win7 snd re install the drivers with no sucess.
I own a Dell Presicion M90 with ricoh firewire chipset. I am running win 7 ultimate (processor t2600 @ 2.16 GHz + 2Gb ram). Currently I have firewire/usb drivers 4.0.4.2546 (released 08-2010). No improvement at all with new drivers. I cannot even listen music using win media. I am also experiencing wery high latency with cubase & guitar rig 4.
I hope somebody can give me a hint to solve this problem.
thanks

Whenever you get behavior like this (ie, the device "plays" but it exhibits sporadic dropouts or bursts of noise), you should do the following:

1) Make sure you have the latest drivers. It could be a driver bug that has been fixed in a later version.

2) Ensure that your BIOS is not making your device, which for you is your firewire (1394) port, share an IRQ with another device. Because firewire ports on non-Mac PCs are so seldom used, many BIOS often make the port share an IRQ with your ethernet, wireless, or even one of the USB ports. Often this introduces some latency, which in turn causes your MOTU's driver to fail to deliver your software program's audio fast enough to the MOTU. (The result is an "interruption" in the audio which you hear either as a dropout or "noise glitch"). So you can perhaps accomodate this lactency by increasing the buffer size used by your MOTU's driver. (You run the "MOTU Audio Console" and set a larger size for your buffer). But if you prefer better performance, the easiest way to resolve this IRQ dilemma is if your BIOS allows you to reserve IRQs for specific PCI slots and ports. (If so, there should be a BIOS screen where you can change the PnP config from automatic to manual, and pick out IRQ assignments yourself). If you can't get your BIOS to reserve an IRQ specifically for firewire, then try disabling other ports in your BIOS (especially ones you don't use) to see if the BIOS can be persuaded to reduce IRQ sharing. Also, if the firewire is sharing an IRQ with one of your PCI cards, try moving the card to a different slot, as sometimes certain PCI slots share different IRQs.

3) Check your Start menu's "Startup" folder to make sure you're not running some software in the background that is chewing up CPU cycles. In fact, press CTRL-ALT-DELETE to bring up the "Windows Task Manager" notebook, and then flip to the "Performance" page. If your system is idling, and yet the "CPU Usage" is more than a few percent, you've got some undesirable software on your computer. Also check out CPU Usage while playing back on the MOTU.

Buying a Firewire Express card that has a Texas Instrument chipset should fix your problem. The Sonnet Firewire/USB Express34 card is a good one.

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/fwusb ... ard34.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I had a quick look at your computers spec's and it looks like it can take this card, just make sure first.