help with x-fi fatal1ty please

i have an x-fi fatal1ty and every day i will get this problem where the sound will suddenly start crackling and popping and this will continue till i shut down. it sometimes even restart my computer with no warning which is very irritating while gaming. the crackling completely wipes out all music and sound from the game. i used to have a different problem where i would get horrible squeeling noises that would always crash or reset my computer. i moved the card to a different pci slot and that seemed to solve that problem but now i have the crackling one. i have the latest drivers, i have reinstalled the software, i just dont seem to be having much luck with this card. what should i do next?

I have X-Fi and run into no problems. Most people I hear from do not have such problems either. The truth is you always need latest drivers for both sound card, motherboard and anything else in your PC. Once this is done, all random problems are usually gone....

Let me try to help you out:

1) did you disable onboard sound?
2) how many processes do you load at startup
3) what is memory usage when you run into popping etc troubles
4) what is the IRQ sharing situation and your ACPI configuration.
5) did you have another soundblaster card in this PC before? Did you uninstall it with ctzapp.exe?
6) did you install only driver from creativ website?
7) did you talk/mail with creativ technical support on that?

Good Luck and I hope you can fix your PC.

If you bothered to click on the link I provided, you'll KNOW that you are incorrect in your assumptions. All around forums everywhere including Creatives, there are people with issues that have no solution. No amount of tinkering fixes them. Actually, I remember when there was a topic before and creative deleted it! It had 1000 posts and they said that the people there were not contacting support. So another 1000 post topic appeared. Since then they have acknowledged problems but still maintain they have no idea why it happens.

it could be you have a faulty card. any chance you could try it in someone elses comp or an old one.

thanks for your help i have done the following

i disabled the onboard sound before i installed the card so im sure its not that,
you ask what memory usage i have when i run into popping troubles which is interesting because it does normally happen on games such as world of war craft and battlefield 2 which i play online. but why would the memory mess up the sound? (i have x2 512mb corsair xms3200pro which i consider to be good quality memory)
this is my first creative card as i have always used on board sound before.
i installed the latest and only driver for the xfi fatal1ty from the creative website
i have contacted them but they are not really helping, there just taking me round in circles.

do you have an nforce4 motherboard because people tell me theres a conflict problem between xfi and nforce4?

do you have the fatal1ty or have you got a different xfi card?

i am sure the sound card is the reason for restarts on my comp but at startup after the restart i have chassis temp of 44 degrees and cpu temp of 40 degrees. do you think overheating may be causing comp to restart?
those are the max temps i have seen on my computer so far.

I played BF2 with 1 GB for a while and it ran... it stuttered from time to time, but still qualified as playable. 2 GB definitely smoothed things out however.

I agree that you should try the card out in another (possibly non-Nvidia based) motherboard. I have an X-Fi Xtreme Music and an NForce 4 motherboard and have had no problems... in fact, the X-Fi actually solved problems I have having with sound (stupid old SoundBlaster Live!)

Good luck!