I have a Gigabyte GA-MA74GMT-S2 motherboard. I am using Jack for sound - connected to ALSA. I am running Ubuntu 12.04.

aplay -l reports

card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: ALC887 Analog [ALC887 Analog]

The problem is that the default setup, that alsa decides to use, causes stuttering and xruns no matter how generous I set the frames/period or periods/buffer etc. Also, Jack works fine if I plug in an external USB sound system and use that. My processor is an AMD phenom x4 945, and I have 8GB ram, and Video card is Geforce GTX550 Ti, all of which should be quite capable enough. I also tried Pulseaudio and that works fine, but I need to use Jack

At first I thought it might be an interrupt conflict, but I have found that adding "options snd-hda-intel model=generic" to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf causes it to play correctly, but the limited mixer setup lacks controls I need - so this setup isn't good enough. Still, it seems to prove it isn't a hardware conflict.

I have tried many other models, such as 3stack, 6stack, auto and even basic, and they all suffer from the stuttering. I eventually found "options snd-hda-intel model=3stack-6ch-intel" works without stuttering, and mixer is much closer to what it needs to be.

Can anyone help on how to get a correct and accurate model for ALSA to use?

More info on the hardware that might help...

 *-multimedia
   description: Audio device
   product: SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)
   vendor: Hynix Semiconductor (Hyundai Electronics)
   physical id: 14.2
   bus info: pci@0000:00:14.2
   version: 00
   width: 64 bits
   clock: 33MHz
   capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list
   configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=32
   resources: irq:16 memory:fe024000-fe027fff