Creative X-Fi Xtreme Gamer Snap, Crackle, Pop

Yes, it's one of these threads again. I have a MSI NF750-G55 motherboard w/ the ill-fated nForce chipset, this one being 750a SLI. I am running on Windows 7 x64 Professional. I have tried modifying the latency timers in BIOS, updating BIOS, completely uninstalling the drivers w/ Driver Sweeper, disabling devices, disabling hardware acceleration, turning off active auto-virus programs, etc. I put it into my XP system today and experienced none of these issues. It must be something with the Creative drivers or Vista/Windows 7's audiodg.exe.

On the DPC Latency Checker, I have seen spikes as high as 99,000 us...whatever unit of a second that is. The graph looks, for the most part, unstable. I jump from 200 us to 2,000 us in a blink.

Clearly the XtremeGamer wasn't designed for Windows 7, but it still does not justify its failure to operate correctly on the operating system. It is an old sound card I love dearly. My question now is to ask whether any of you have any suggestions, and if not, will buying a PCI-E version of the X-fi chipset solve my problems? The ones without the X-fi chipset are quite expensive and seem to be designed for audio engineers and other music audiophiles. I use mine primarily for gaming.

will buying a PCI-E version of the X-fi chipset solve my problems?

Best I can say is maybe. If you're not adverse to trying modded drivers it might be worth giving this one a try,

SB X-Fi Series AuzenUAA Pack 1.5 (02/20/2010) - Creative Labs

It is a little older than the current Creative driver, but it worked and sounded just fine on my Xtreme Music when I was using it back then. If you do decide to try it follow Daniel's advice for uninstalling (about half way down on page 5, SB X-Fi Series AuzenUAA Pack 1.5 (02/20/2010) - Page 5 - Creative Labs ),

Uninstall the driver by running the Setup.exe, selecting "Remove all shared files", then reboot.

Uninstall all apps, reboot.

Remove the Creative folders in "Program Files" and "Program Files (x86)".

Remove the "Software\Creative Tech" and "Software\Wow6432Node\Creative Tech" registry trees inside HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

Install the driver, reboot.

Install the apps.

There has also been issues with more than 3GB of RAM. Uninstall some RAM in your system and see if that makes a difference. There was a Beta driver last year that fixed the problem (as reported by many users on the Dell users forum) but the Beta driver has been removed from the Creative (SoundBlaster) downloads.

i must be lucky, i've got an xtreme gamer and 4 gigs o' ram.

never had a problem in any of the many builds of 7 x64 i've tried using standard creative drivers.

have you tried sticking the card into a different spare slot on your mobo (if you have one)?

mickey megabyte said:

i must be lucky, i've got an xtreme gamer and 4 gigs o' ram.

never had a problem in any of the many builds of 7 x64 i've tried using standard creative drivers.

have you tried sticking the card into a different spare slot on your mobo (if you have one)?

Also have the same setup on my second box - W7 Ultimate (32-bit) 4GB RAM. Mine's running fine.

Have you tried the drivers below from Creative:

Creative Worldwide Support > X-Fi XtremeGamer

Regards

Edit:

Sorry for not reading your post properly - just noticed your comment about the nForce chipset.
Have a look at this thread

Hope this helps and regards

Thanks for the contributions. There's no other PCI slot so that's a no-go. I'll try the 3rd party drivers and get back to you

I tried those 3rd party drivers out and while the sound I think is a little lesser quality, the cracks and snaps were less severe. Let's just limit my question down to one now: Will a PCI-E X-Fi card solve my problem?

turn the volume down to 90, that seems to help. there were other things but i forgot

You should try the following. The Power plan set to high perfomance, as this will reduce DPC latency. DPC latency may be the cause of why it occurs crackling sound.