[Lunaryn]

I'm also having a problem with this:

ECS NFORCE4M-A motherboard
AMD Athlon64 X2 Dual-core 5600+
nVidia GEForce 8500 GT (PCI-E, EVGA OEM)
SoundBlaster Live! (original) or onboard nVidia sound (Realtek AC'97)
Windows 2000 Professional

The music skips severely in both Vana'diel Bench 3 and POL Viewer (haven't finished installing FFXI proper) when using the SB Live! card. The effect is sort of like there's an output buffer that's being continually written to without checking to see if it's full, so periodically it skips ahead to the next cycle of output. The actual amount skipped varies a bit, but it occurs very frequently and generally skips many seconds at a time.

When using the onboard sound, the effect is much less pronounced, happening only a few times each run through the benchmark. Using the newest (faster) drivers for the video card, I get skipping during the benchmark both on high and low resolution (skips once on high, a couple times on low). Using the supplied drivers, I get skipping during the low resolution benchmark but haven't yet seen it on high.

Has anyone else noticed anything like the more severe SB Live! symptoms (constant skipping), or is anyone aware of compatibility issues with AMD Athlon64 dual-core processors? I've also had some other slightly erratic behavior with regard to the SB Live! in this particular system (it disappeared for a while and had to be moved to a different PCI slot) so I'm still testing things and may try to swap out the board in a few days...

Note for comparison that I've successfully played video files with no sync issues, and that I can play the same bgws from WinAmp/in_ffxi.dll without any skipping. This seems symptomatic of a video/audio sync issue, maybe, but definitely one specific to code in POL/FFXI/Vana'diel Bench, not affecting general playback.