Creative X-Fi cards and nForce compatibility problems...

Kayocz

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Oct 18, 2006
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18,510
Does anyone know if there has been any progress with the compatibility issue between X-Fi series cards and nVidia nForce chipsets?

I'd really like to get one for a new system I'm building, but I can't get an update on the problem.

For those who don't know... This is from a customer review on Amazon.com:

"Pros: Perfect sound, solved resampling issues

Cons: famous popping/crackling noises makes it useless for gaming, especially in BF2 (which use OpenAL by Creative). Crystallizer is useless.

This card has the most advanced sound processor which does not work on at least 20% of high end systems, not only NVidia NForce 4 chipset, but also with other AMD and Intel CPU motherboards: see Google for "X-Fi popping/crackling". Even if you do not have in game crackling immediately, you have a good chance to get it after any memory or HD upgrade or driver configuration change. For long time Creative denied existence of this problem. Eventually it was recognized (see official CL forums) and a new driver (since November 2005!) was promised at the end of May 2006, but beta version published 05/30/06 did not solve my problem. In the case of old audigy 2 zs the problem was solved with unofficial "hacked" drivers. I suspect that X-Fi crackling is an architecture design flow, which cannot be completely solved at software level, because PCI bus cannot provide sufficient memory access for the "the fastest sound processor" simultaneously with high end graphic card, HD controller, and other devices
."
 
Simple as I can put it!

X-FI Extreme Music with a previously owned ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe M/B NF4 = Bad sound troubles nothing I tried resolved it!

Same X-FI Extreme Music in an EPoX 9NPA3 SLI M/B NF4 = No problems at all going on 7 months.