Garbled sound NF4/Sound Blaster XFi Gamer with over 4GB memory

This seems to be a problem that Creative has not been able to fix with new drivers. The work around is to limit the computer to below 4GB of memory. Has anyone come up with drivers that work so I can use all my memory?

Sorry but your post leaves lots of questions. Can you tell us what the issue is with what piece of hardware or software? System specs?

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Thanks

Sound is garbled, some people say it is popping, scratchy. System is: MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI, Opteron 185, 4 GB DDR 500 Memory, Sound Blaster XFi Extreme Gamer Sound Card and ATI HD 4850. This is a clean install of Windows 7 64 Home. Latest Creative drivers for Win7 cause sound to sound broken up or garbled. The work around is to lower the amount of memory windows can use below 4 GB, through msconfig. This work around gets the sound working, but windows now shows I have 3.25 GB of memory. The drivers seem to be the problem, because Creative has come out with new drivers and beta drivers to correct the problem and it has not worked yet. Would like to know it anyone else has had this problem and what they did about it?

Not sure what's going on there as you shouldn't have to lower your system memory to get your soundcard working. Not familiar with that issue.

It could be, or sounds like, an issue between your motherboard and soundcard seeing that you have to lower your memory to get the card to work properly, but that's a guess as I'm not familiar with AMD systems.

One thing you need to be aware of is some motherboards don't like having all four Dimm slots filled with memory, and if they are, you may have to drop the memory speed down. I would suggest you look through your owner's manual and see what it says about memory configurations.

Anyway my system is different from yours but I have a Creative X-FI Titanium Pro and have no issues with it and Windows 7, and I have 6gig of memory.

By the way when did you notice this problem?

I noticed this problem when upgrading to Windows 7 64. It runs fine under Win XP 32, but that OS does not see all 4 GB of memory.

radman3d said:

I noticed this problem when upgrading to Windows 7 64. It runs fine under Win XP 32, but that OS does not see all 4 GB of memory.

Click to expand...

So its not the memory that's the issue it's the OS. 64-bit requires different drivers.

Are you using the beta drivers? If not try them it says they work on x64.

BETA driver

If you are on the beta drivers that may be the issue.

I tried the beta driver and it did not solve the problem. Creative seems to think this is the problem: Technical Details
We have observed through direct observation of the PCI bus on the nVidia nForce 4 motherboards that when the crackle symptoms are occuring, the Sound Blaster X-Fi card PCI bus master memory requests for audio data are being held off (not serviced) for very long intervals.
We have observed peak holdoffs of up to 2 milliseconds in some cases. This is unusual chipset behavior that is beyond the ability of a hardware audio accelerator to compensate for in its internal buffering. The Sound Blaster X-Fi tolerance for these PCI holdoffs is approximately 120 microseconds peak holdoff, with a 1 microsecond average holdoff.
These design tolerances are based on observation of real PCI bus behavior on leading motherboards over a period of many motheboard hardware generations.
The nForce 4 motherboard is the first motherboard on which these extremely long PCI service holdoffs have been observed by Creative, where another PCI device in the system was not causing the holdoff.


Not sure how to fix this issue.

I have more information for you on this sound issue. I can boot or reboot and the issue is gone, but after a period of time the distortion returns. I have not been able to pin point what the trigger is that brings the issue back. This really has me baffled as how to troubleshoot this. Do you have any ideas on how to procide troubleshooting this?

Thank you,

Jeff

I have a very similar situation with my setup. Did you ever figure it out?

I had to turn off my s/w & h/w memory remapping in the bios to get the sound to stop cracking. Sound problem fixed but windows shows 2.75gb memory available out of 4gb now as apposed to 3.0 gb memory out of 4gb with the remapping on.