X870 Tomahawk PCIe sound issue with newer BIOS

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NStriker

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I'm one of those rare few who has a PCIe sound card (specifically a Sound Blaster AE-9) and a 5.1 speaker setup. These cards are known to have problems on some boards where certain loads on the PCIe bus will cause all the audio channels to swap around (see /r/SoundBlasterOfficial on Reddit for examples). For me, it happens just playing a game normally and then suddenly BAM. Front left is gone, rear right is center, etc.

This used to be a problem on my old B550 board until a BIOS update fixed it. It was never an issue on my X870 Tomahawk... UNTIL NOW.

Everything had been fine under 7E51v1A67 and earlier, but upgrading to 7E51v1A82 and now 7E51v1A92 has caused the issue to start with this board. Presumably because of whatever this change is: "Improved PCIe-based devices compatibility under certain CPU or system combinations"

I've tried disabling PSPP, manually setting slots to their correct gen (3 on the sound card, 4 on the M.2, 5 on the GPU), swapping the sound card to the other PCIe slot, even enabling Message Signaled-Based Interrupts (doesn't actually support). The only end-user fix that actually works is to force all slots to PCIe gen 3, but that's not something I want to do.

MSI, please fix your BIOS.
 
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Have you revert BIOS to the worked version 7E51v1A67 and earlier to check whether the sound issue been mitigated?
 
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1A67 and 1A70 for the x870 tomahawk has the same AGESA PI 1.2.0.3f. You could try the latter to be more upto date.
I'm running 1A90 currently and will not try the 91,92 and so forth. Unless there is a forum post stating it's magic.
Bios ending with a zero are considered final, and ending with the other numbers are beta. Not to say those aren't good, I ran 1A24 for quite some time.
But yeah, try different bios versions. And if all fails, go back to the working one. No shame in that.
 
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Thanks. That's interesting. I was not aware of that versioning method. I will try 1A80 and see if my theory about the PCIe changes introduced in 81 is correct.
 
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1A80 works perfectly, as suspected. Of course, this removes things like RAM bank refresh mode select that came in later AGESA.

So, how do I get MSI's attention that they broke it? I don't want to be stuck on that BIOS for eternity.
 
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