Freezing in Gameplay Caused by Sound, HELP!

[NoRhythm]

I haven't used my laptop to play games for a few months, mainly because I was so busy with school. After finals I started up again and noticed a lot of lag and freezing. At first I didn't know what was causing it and thought maybe it was the connection (Diablo III). Nothing I did in Video or Audio settings seemed to help. I recently got Portal 2 and noticed that the freezing only occurred right before Glados or Wheatley spoke which leads me to believe that the issue is with certain types of sound.

I've tried updating all of my drivers and that fixed nothing. I tried cleaning out my fans thinking it was a heat problem, nope. Yesterday I factory reset my computer, still having the same problem. Now I think it must be my sound card, but I'm no computer genius and I would like a second opinion. Please help, I don't want to spend money on something that might not fix my problem.

Specs:

Graphics Chipset ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850
Core Clock in MHz 625 MHz
Memory Clock in MHz 1000 MHz
Total Memory Bandwidth in GByte/s 64.0 GByte/s
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU Q740 @ 1.73GHz, 1730 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processors

 

[yikes81]

Have you updated your direct x drivers?

 

[NoRhythm]

Have you updated your direct x drivers?

I've updated my AMD drivers, where would one find direct x drivers?

 

[yikes81]

Try this link. This seems to be a pretty basic instruction on updating directx.
http://support.gamehouse.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/508/~/directx-and-how-to-update-it

 

[NoRhythm]

Hmmm according to that I have the latest version. Suggestions?

 

[NoRhythm]

Please help!

 

[yikes81]

Its possible you may need to roll back some drivers. I am thinking maybe the graphics drivers.

 

[NoRhythm]

After I used Alien Respawn I tried playing Portal 2 with nothing new installed and it had the same problem. Could it be a heat problem? I've had my laptop for a year and a half and I've never changed the thermal paste. Could that be causing this?

 

[JennyM]

I've had heating problems with two of my laptops but it didn't tend to freeze, it would have shut down. If you want to be sure, there's a simple download called GPU-z that will tell you all your temperatures and also monitor it and feed the data to a document for you in realtime. This is the one the alienware tech guys use. The link is http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/
I'm no computer expert, but it does sound to me more like a graphics issue than a sound one.
Is your laptop not still under warranty?

 

[JennyM]

Another thing you could try, is click start, then type Reliabiltiy into the search box. It might give you some more information on your problems, it's another thing the alienware tech guys did on mine, it creats a report for you to view your system's overall stability and you can click on each day to review any hardware or software problems that have impacted on your system.
Another way to get to it is click control panel, system & security, action centre, reliability monitor.

Fingers crossed you get something helpful.

 

[NoRhythm]

I've had heating problems with two of my laptops but it didn't tend to freeze, it would have shut down. If you want to be sure, there's a simple download called GPU-z that will tell you all your temperatures and also monitor it and feed the data to a document for you in realtime. This is the one the alienware tech guys use. The link is http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/
I'm no computer expert, but it does sound to me more like a graphics issue than a sound one.
Is your laptop not still under warranty?

My warranty was only for a year which I'm seriously regretting now, but that's just how it goes. I'll try your suggestions though and update soon. Thank you!

 

[yikes81]

Let us know which resolution fixed your issue. I would like to know "just in case".

 

[JennyM]

Ah thats unfortunate about the warranty, same happened with my Aurora - the motherboard failed after a year but even though the system was out of warranty the motherboard was still covered under Asus. Dell wasn't able to help & Asus don't deal directly with the public, but I managed to buy an RMA number of a computer company in England, I shipped the board to them, they sent it on to Asus, who repaired it.
I guess thats a long-winded way of telling you that if your graphics card etc turns out to be faulty, it may still be covered under the card manufacturer's warranty, its worth looking into anyway, it could be 2 yrs.

I'm guessing you already looked at the amd site, but if not, check out the troubleshooting section entitled "Troubleshooting tips that can help resolve system / game software reboot, freeze, crash issues that occur when playing game software" There's loads of stuff on that page to work through for you. Here's the link,


http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/TroubleshootingGameIssues.aspx

 

[NoRhythm]

Okay, so I tested the heat and it stays about 125 F on all four pretty consistently. I disabled my sound and played and it seemed to work a lot better, although I suppose that could also be because there's less processing power being used and it could still be my motherboard or memory or my harddrive.

Sorry for taking so long to reply, I've been working lots of double shifts lately.

I figure I should update my sound card and memory since those are the cheapest.