UX2 with Win 10 on a Dell XPS 15 - random pops and crackling

[kub666]

I'm getting random pops and short distortion during playback on my UX2. Worked fine on a previous laptop, now it's hard to listen to anything as it generates short noises or sound drop outs randomly. No issue with recording - apparently this only affects the output, both on headphones and line out.

 

I think I have tried everything I could find on this forum - went through the faq on this site, tried connecting to powered hub (normally it's connected directly to the laptop), changed power plan to high performance, connected to different USB port, turned off all other background tasks, turned off wifi, disabled onboard sound card, removed all other USB devices, changed all the ASIO settings in every possible configuration...

 

I'm really running out of ideas here. I have seen posts on this issue - many are unresolved and whatever worked for the others have zero effect in my situation. The UX2 worked fine on my old laptop (5 year old Alienware), but that was on Windows 7. So it is probably UX2 not liking the new Dell XPS or Windows 10, but what exactly is the issue? No clue.

 

Does anybody have any ideas different than what I have already mentioned?

 

[kub666]

Well, no replies, but in the meantime I have managed to fix it. The issue was not with the UX2 or Windows, but with graphic cards. The Dell XPS laptop has 2: one is Intel, which is being used by default, and the other is high-performance Nvidia, which should be used for games and such. Which is being used by which application is being decided by the system. When I forced Reaper to use the Nvidia card - all the problems were suddenly gone.

 

I guess this could be added to the FAQ - many laptops now have multiple GPUs and it is not so obvious that this could be the source of sound problems.