I must say thanks for this! new information for a change! I'm so very tired of these bits ain't bits discussions these days over and over and over...with same old stories over and over.... thanks JimH for not locking this...yet
I would have!
but now my interest is piqued.
Thank you Dean70
I've noticed in most new motherboards the option for enable HPET in Bios, it seems to be enabled by default.
I've never experimented with enabling it in Win(7) apparently there is a CMD Line statement to enable it, disable it, correct?
The following statement is my own conjecture, just to get your comments:
With an on-board "sound card", utilizing motherboard and OS resources, it could be expected to benefit from higher accuracy clocks/timing/etc..which seems to be what you are seeing... interesting....
However, running an external DAC, via an Asynchronous USB interface (thus by definition immune to upstream timing instabilities) would not benefit as did the motherboard-embedded audio system.
Doing my own testing has shown enabling HPET timer in the OS which increases the Performance Counter resolution from 3.5mhz to 14.3mhz has shown a positive effect in the high freqency smoothness in MC. There is a utility WinTimerTest which shows the relationship between Performance Counter and Clock Tick & they sync up much closer with HPET enabled.
Comparing to 2 other "niche" lighweight players has shown they were mostly immune to the HPET timer changes, but it did bring MC to the same level of high freqency smoothness as the others.
This was done with A/B testing using headphones through Realtek onboard audio. It also has had a positive effect on my AMD HTPC system (which the BIOS doesnt have the option to disable HPET, so could not repeat all the tests).
The only downside is that it makes the PC more laggy for general use, so I would only recommend this setting on a dedicated HTPC.