Hi! I bought an Audigy 2 ZS soundcard a couple of months ago. Sadly, it did nothing for my gaming performance. In fact it seems to have lowered the framerates!
In games with EAX on I get occasional static and stuttering. It's really annoying. I spent a bit of money on this card and it's worse than my onboard sound was. Please help me fix this!
A couple of other symptoms that may help you gurus pinpoint my problem:

--I thought it might be IRQs, since my sound and video cards used to share the same IRQ. But I fiddled with that and they are separate now and I still have sound issues.
--I don't have any drivers for my onboard sound on. Fresh install, never put them on the system.
--Problem only seems to happen with EAX on in most games. Quake4 stutters no matter what the sound is set on.
--Unreal2004 doesn't stutter, but the video freezes for a second every minute or two.
--Online games, such as Guild Wars and WOW are really bad. Lots of static

My specs:
AMD Athlon 3000+
MSI NForce 2 mobo with most recent drivers
ATI X800 XT AIW
Creative Audigy 2 ZS PP with the extra bits installed
1 GB 2700 RAM

Thanks for any help!

Just a question, but did you disable the onboard sound in BIOS ?

Not sure if this could be causing the problem, but I think it would be best to disable in BIOS so it's not loaded at all.

Forgot to mention that. Yeah, the onboard has been disabled via BIOS. Thanks and keep thinking. This is driving me nuts!

It seems that you are not the only person with this problem.

Have a read of this link: http://forums.creative.com/creativ [...] e.id=46767

There is no easy solution, but it gives you some things to try that may resolve the problem.

Thanks for you response, again. Looks like most of that info is for people who are just getting static from their speakers without doing anything. I've found a couple more things to try, though. Might post an update later.

Nada. Nothing worked. I tried:
--Adjusting power cables to ensure the card is getting clean juice
--Playing with a bunch of BIOS settings
--Lowering my 3d acceleration
--lowering my unused volumes such as cd

That last one seemed to help the online gaming squeals, though. Still, any game that uses the audio hardware still just stutters away. Could it be my PSU? It's a 425W, nothing special. I run five fans in my case. More juice? I just don't know...

I figured it out. I did a re-install of windows and found out that it was my firewall program. Norton Firewall 2006. Don't know why, but it was causing problems. Just thought I'd post in case it helps someone else.