AlmostPro

Hello! First off, I would like to say that I own a Corsair's K95 Platinum keyboard (with Cherry MX Brown switches) and I really love it. A little overview of my setup: I own a Dell's XPS 9500 laptop and have LG's 2k monitor, K95 Platinum and Logitech's G502 mouse connected to it via Dell's docking system. A while ago I had my laptop's touchpad fixed. It came with a known problem for Dell's XPS laptop's. Then I also had my operating system reinstalled (Windows 10 Pro). It was in September. More into the problem itself: I then connected the keyboard back to the computer and everything else on the computer was working well, too. First, I was too lazy to download the iCUE software so I just used the lighting effects saved on the keyboard's own memory slots. But some time in October I thought it was finally time to get the iCUE program to set up the lighting just the way I wanted. This is when problems with my computer began. Back then I did not link the problems to the iCUE software. I thought it was some driver problem. Any time I would watch a video/movie/TV show that I had downloaded or any video online (on YouTube, for example) I would get this crunching sound through my speakers and the audio of every video file would get ahead of the video itself. The crunching sound would appear for a second after every 5–10 seconds and I reckoned every time this weird sound came, the sound of the video would get ahead of the actual video a bit. After 5–7 minutes into any video, it was clear that the sound was ahead of the video. I found a quick way to fix it: I just paused the video for one second and the sound and the video itself were back in sync again. Thus, it made me lazy again to dive deeper into the problem and solve it for good. As some time passed, I tried to manually reinstall some drivers but nothing fixed the problems. All the drivers were up to date. There were also some automatic Windows updates during this time but they were of no help, either. ------- Then yesterday I finally decided I had had enough. I did a clean Windows reinstall to make sure it really was a software not a hardware problem. So after a first Windows reinstall I downloaded VLC player and put one of my favorite TV shows on to check whether the problem was still present. IT WAS NOT. The Windows reinstall seemed to fix the problem. I was finally happy and then I continued to reinstall some programs that I use, including Corsair's iCUE4. After a successful install of iCUE and a restart to the computer, the audio problem was back. Even then I did not link the problem to the iCUE4 but I got a hunch the problem might be caused by one of the problems I installed after the fresh Windows reinstall. Other programs included Logitech's G Hub, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Mozilla Firefox, Signal, VLC, to name a few. Then, I reinstalled the Windows once again. I downloaded Mozilla Firefox, went on YouTube and checked to see whether my audio issue was present. I also checked with a offline video file using VLC. There was no problem. I then proceeded to install iCUE4. During the installation, I even left the video on YouTube playing and right after the installation was complete, the crackling sound through the speakers was back and also the sound of the video started to get ahead of the video itself again. I also restarted the computer but it was of no help. Now I just uninstalled the iCUE4 and the problem instantly vanished. Then I tried to install the legacy version of iCUE. I am happy to say that there is no issue with this. Everything on my computer runs smoothly and so does the legacy version of iCUE. ------- Has anyone else experienced the same or a similar issue with iCUE? Could anyone comment as to why this happened to me? I am glad I found that the issue was caused by iCUE4 but I have no idea why. Thank you! All the best, AlmostPro