Creative Sound Card Problem Thread

thunder2008 said:

To all W7 users with creative cards both original brands as well as vendor brands, list your cards model information along with your motherboard and operating system specs. such 32 or 64bit.

I have linked this thread to creative to better help show the many different issues going on with w7 and creative audio cards and softwares.

This thread is read by creative so be a descriptive as possible with your audio problems.

Please also remember to note the amount of RAM you have installed. This is a trigger for the problem to surface in Win 7 for some motherboard/SB card combinations. Note that your member profile for Windows 7 Forums contains a form for entering this information (see My System Specs in the lower left corner of this posting for an example).

Dale

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DukeX007X said:

What's up fellow Windows 7 users? It seems I have the same problem like everyone else.

Issue: Distorted & Static sounds at random times with Audigy WDM drivers from Windows Update.

Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster - Audigy 2 ZS Gamer

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI

OS: Windows 7 32bit & 64bit

I attempted to resolve the issues by installing
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy series Driver for Vista (Release: 17 Jul 08) but no success. I currently have installed Creative Sound Blaster Audigy series Beta Driver (Release: 3 Sep 08) no success.

All drivers seem to distort and produce static sounds at random times. Sound card works 100% in Windows XP Pro SP3

-DukeX007X

I see you have 4GB of RAM. Try using MSCONFIG to limit maximum RAM to 2048MB, restart, and see if the problem persists. If this resolves your sound quality issue, limiting your available RAM is the only workaround I've found to work until the root cause is resolved.

Dale

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dsopocy said:

I see you have 4GB of RAM. Try using MSCONFIG to limit maximum RAM to 2048MB, restart, and see if the problem persists. If this resolves your sound quality issue, limiting your available RAM is the only workaround I've found to work until the root cause is resolved.

Dale

Dale, thank you for your response. I'll give your workaround a try. I will keep you and the thread posted.

LePoilu said:

I just tried with 2GB of RAM instead of 4GB... but it doesn't chance anything. Distorsion and cracking are still here !

Limiting RAM is known to be a viable workaround only for motherboards based on the nVidia nForce4 chipset - so apparently your motherboard uses another chipset.

One known root cause of crackling and popping on Creative X-Fi sound cards is excessive latency on PCI bus requests (see reference in one of my earlier posts). One thing that you can do to troubleshoot your issue is to check Device Manager to see if there is any resource sharing going on between your sound and video cards.

Dale

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