We just had a series of weird network glitches at work that may have some relevance to the problems some folks are having. New systems were seemingly fine, except they would have erratic stuttering in the audio, or weird domain authentication errors and other network oddities.
On a new Dell OptiPlex 960 I've confirmed that disabling the "C State" setting in the BIOS resolves the problem; I've also set the sleep mode to S1 from S3. Apparently the new greener aggressive micro-sleep settings are not handled properly and cause glitches with real-time devices such as sound and network cards. Anecdotal reports are that this is also an issue on a Dell OptiPlex 760.
It's not yet clear whether this is a problem with Dell's BIOS, the motherboard, the CPU implementation, or what. However, anyone looking to do performance gaming probably wants these off anyway. The symptoms certainly *looked* like a number of the trouble reports I've seen here, with mysterious network micro-hangs.
We just had a series of weird network glitches at work that may have some relevance to the problems some folks are having. New systems were seemingly fine, except they would have erratic stuttering in the audio, or weird domain authentication errors and other network oddities.
On a new Dell OptiPlex 960 I've confirmed that disabling the "C State" setting in the BIOS resolves the problem; I've also set the sleep mode to S1 from S3. Apparently the new greener aggressive micro-sleep settings are not handled properly and cause glitches with real-time devices such as sound and network cards. Anecdotal reports are that this is also an issue on a Dell OptiPlex 760.
It's not yet clear whether this is a problem with Dell's BIOS, the motherboard, the CPU implementation, or what. However, anyone looking to do performance gaming probably wants these off anyway. The symptoms certainly *looked* like a number of the trouble reports I've seen here, with mysterious network micro-hangs.
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