PC info:

GPU: HIS H785F2G2M 7850 2GB

Catalyst Driver: 13.1 & 12.8 (issue occurs in both)

Operating system: Windows 7 Ultimate

Processor: E8400 C2D Wolfdale

Ram: 4GB ADATA

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-G31M ES2L LGA 775

PSU: Antec NEO Eco 620C 620watt

Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200RPM

Not sure if anyone has any ideas here, but I recently replaced a GTX260 with the HIS 7850 2GB model listed above, and ever since installing Catalyst drivers, the sound in every media player pops at random times, and it's very annoying. This does not happen in games or while watching Youtube for example. It only happens in the media players listed above while watching hi-def movies.

I have a dual-boot system with Windows 7 and XP, and this issue only occurs on 7. It does not occur on XP. I have done the following to isolate the cause and determine that it is the 7 drivers:

1. I checked the box to disable enhancements in 7's sound properties. This did not work.

2. I booted over to XP, opened KMplayer with no Catalyst drivers installed, and played one of the movie files. It was free of the popping noises. I then installed driver version 12.8 (which came with the 7850) and the popping noises still did not occur in XP.

3. Booted back over to Windows 7. Uninstalled driver 13.1 and installed 12.8 to see if this would fix it. It did not. The popping noises still occured in 12.8 on Windows 7.

4. Uninstalled driver 12.8 and played a movie file in KMPlayer with no driver installed. The popping/crackling noises were gone. Re-installed 13.1 and they appeared again.

Given the steps taken above, I have pretty much isolated it to something specific to the Windows 7 Catalyst drivers causing this popping/crackling issue to occur, and it is something specifically related to the media players. It basically sounds like what you'd hear in an emulator for example if you didn't have buffer underrun set properly. The sound will crackle at random times during playback and occasionally get stuck for a split second before returning to normal.

I'm hoping someone has some sort of idea as to what's causing this, because it's kind of a deal breaker and I know it's something in relation to the way the Catalyst driver is communicating to Windows 7 during playback in the media players as it does not occur in XP and does not occur with any other apps than the media players.

Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

Edit: I have also downloaded and installed KLite codec pack just to see if it was a codec issue, but the issue persisted. I am pretty confident this is not a codec issue or anything at the hardware level.

Did you do a clean driver install? As in.. go to safe mode and use Driver Fusion / Driver Sweeper to get rid of ALL NVidia drivers? It takes only 1 missed leftover file to cause weird issues. Go to safe mode, clean both amd and nvidia drivers, boot W7 normally, install whatever drivers you prefer. Doing this would rule out any conflicts.