Sound card issues, cutting out, jittering, cracking, choppy audio

After a rebuild of my pc I was being plagued with sound issue/s. Everything seemed to be fine, then when watching a youtube clip I would get a stuttering, jittering drop out, this was made worse whenever I would scroll the mouse.

First I unplugged all USB devices . rebooted, started disabling drivers from within windows and had no luck.

Searching the internet I found a cool tool DPC Latency Checker that allows you to find whether your system has drivers that may affect audio performance. When it runs it will show a chart with either red or green bars. Red being bad there are errors, driver conflicts or green everything is. So I downloaded it and ran and here is what I saw.

Bad… bad.. bad.. driver issues as you can see.

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Just prior to upgrading my PC I purchased a USB3 PCI-express expansion card to give me more USB3 ports, however this one card alone was the bane of all my problems. After removing this card and re running DPC Latency Checker this is the result I got.

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All green bars, no more choppy audio, a nomrla life again. but a PCIe USB expansion that doesn’t have a home in my new rig.

Hope this helps any of you out when you are ever experiencing any sort of audio issues. Use this tool to check the driver/s.