Does EAX ever work?

I've had a sound blaster live player for 2 years, in two different machines and I'm getting seriously fed up with it.
The only game EAX has ever actually worked correctly in is half life.
In Unreal and UT (and Rune and DS9 TF) if you enable hardware sound the in game volume control breaks and you get weird 'hot spots' of sound where the volume drops to zero if you move one inch to either side, and no noticable EAX.
In Sin the sound used to get broken up, in SoF the volume breaks and the sound cuts out on some levels and there's no occlusion effects, in Urban Chaos the sound starts cutting out, in other "EAX" games similar things. All games patched to latest version and sb drivers upgraded several times.

Its given me nothing but aggro, this thing. Is EAX actually supposed to work in UT engine games or not? They all say they support it but it never actually works in practice (rune took out all reference to hardware sound in the last patch, so maybe they know the UT guys are lying?)

Or is my card actually faulty? The dodgy electricity supply where I used to live blew up 2 hard drives, a gfx card, a monitor, and possibly a cd drive, so maybe it buggered this thing as well. Considering buying a new one, but what if it still doesn't work? Maybe Creative just can't write drivers or EAX is so fiddly no game maker can get it right?

i have 4 point surround or 4.1 i would assume. but EAX works very well much better then A3d i had before.

but i'm sad to see that the sblive uses up to 34% cpu usage thats real high while playing a high end game.

http://www.anandtech.com/chipsets/ [...] =1535&p=16

I had the same problem!! how are you hooked up? spdif digital? eax wont work that way into a 5.1 reciever. you have to use the mini-din to rca cables and go six cables into your reciever. dvd's and stuff will work 5.1 through spdif but eax in games only works by using the seperate cables. it really sucks. I'd rather use one cable. you can verify this by doing full sb install and using the speaker test. 5.1 only with seperate cables.
does anyone know if the new Audigy card will resolve this issue. no mention of it in toms latest review.