Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon XP+

The P4 is better because it has reliable chipsets that work.

The CPU itself is reliable because you never have to worry about it burning your house down.

And there isn't so many chipsets to choose from and so many boards to choose from to drive you mad.

<b>How do I solve Soundblaster Audigy problems?</b>
In general the Soundblaster Audigy seems less prone to the crackling and popping problems for which the Live! series were renowned. However, heavy activity on the PCI bus may still cause the occasional crackle. Potential solutions include:

Under Windows XP, ensure you apply the correct Windows XP patch for the Audigy. Note that the initial release of this patch does not support Creative's "RemoteCenter" (infrared control software) or the "Creative Recorder". Creative also warn that the Creative Taskbar is not currently XP compatible. These incompatibilities will be fixed in a subsequent upgrade. The driver update is called ADGXPDrvUpdate.exe.
Crackling can often be caused by the master volume on the sound mixer being set at 100%. Try reducing it to 80% or so and using your hardware volume control instead. Note that there are some reports that the initial driver releases may cause the volume control to occasionally get reset to 100%.
To resolve pops and clicks, try moving the board out of PCI slots 4 or 6 and/or disabling USB. One report that this solved the problem.
Disabling ACPI can resolve crackling by changing the means by which interrupts are shared on the computer (see What is ACPI?).
Installing the latest VIA IDE miniport driver may resolve the problem by improving the use of bus mastering by hard disks on the PCI bus.
Update your Highpoint drivers to the latest version
Try running the "Creative Restore Defaults" program found in the Soundblaster Audigy directory
Are you using a PS/2 mouse? Try changing to a USB mouse - this resolved all crackling issues on my machine. Presumably a USB mouse places different demands on the PCI bus compared with a PS/2 mouse.
If you have a RAID motherboard, try disabling either the VIA IDE controller or the Highpoint controller by moving all your disks onto one or other of the controllers. This reduces the load on the PCI bus.
Try installing the 4in1 drivers both before and after installing the Audigy drivers. One user found that v4.35 of the drivers resolved crackling.
Try unzipping the driver installation file by hand, then running the setup.exe program with the /w parameter (ie. "setup /w" ).
If during driver installation under WindowsXP the computer claims it cannot find the Audigy card, try the following. First, make sure all previous drivers are removed. Go through the following steps to do so:
Open My Computer, Properties, Hardware tab. Click on Driver Signing.
Select the option: "IGNORE - INSTALL THE SOFTWARE ANYWAY AND DON'T ASK FOR MY APPROVAL". Click OK.
Click Start, Control Panel, then "Add or Remove Programs" and remove all Creative applications relating to the sound card.
Insert the sound card's installation CD.
Go to Start then Run... and type: X:\AUDIO\ENGLISH\DRIVERS\CTZAPXX.EXE
where X is your CDROM drive letter.
Click OK and follow the instructions to remove the drivers.
Reboot when prompted.
The sound card will be detected by Windows as a "PCI multimedia audio device" and prompt the "Add New Hardware Wizard".
Cancel the "Add New Hardware Wizard".
Click Start then Run... and type: X:\AUDIO\ENGLISH\DRIVERS\CTZAPXX.EXE
where X is your CDROM drive letter.
Download the Windows XP compatible Audigy drivers. Select "Save to disk" and download the update to "My desktop" or "C:\WINDOWS\DESKTOP".
When the file has completed the phase of being transferred to your computer, locate the file AUDRVWDM.EXE on your desktop and double-click the file.
The driver update utility will initialize and begin the phase of updating your sound board drivers. Follow the instructions carefully.


If it is still telling you that it can't detect the Audigy, try the following steps:

Verify the file name of the download is AUDRVWDM.EXE.
Extract the file into a temporary directory; the update can be extracted with WinZIP, WinRAR, or WinACE. Once the file is extracted, update the drivers with the "Update Device Driver wizard" in the Device Manager; the drivers are located in the DRIVERS folder


If you have problems installing the drivers under Windows 9x/Me try the following:
Starting from a clean install of Windows, let the OS detect the card. If the card shows up under "other device" with a question mark in Device Manager remove the device and reboot. It is important for Windows to properly detect the card as a Sound device.
Once the OS has detected the card and the install wizard pops up, cancel the wizard.
Reboot into Safe Mode. Use Ctzapxx to install the vxd drivers. If Safe Mode does not offer CD support you may need to first copy the drivers from the CD onto the hard disk.
Reboot. You should hear the Windows sound as your machine boots.
Install the software (and drivers unfortunately!) from the CD.
Reboot


KR7A(-RAID) only: Disable APIC in the BIOS (this is the default)
KR7A(-RAID) only: Install the VIA PCI latency patch and update to BIOS 6N or later
KR7A(-RAID) only: Several people are reporting severe problems with the Audigy series of cards and the KR7A(-RAID) when running WindowsXP. Typically the drivers appear unable to install correctly resulting in the card being unrecognised by the system. There is no known solution at present although it should be pointed out that it is possible to get this combination working - I am using this combination on my system without difficulty or any special modifications. However, it is currently not clear what the difference between a working and non-working setup is. There is some evidence that this may be due to a bad batch of Audigy cards as some users have resolved this by replacing the card with another identical one. Apparently Creative Support in France are telling customers that "It has nothing to do with IRQs. Lots of customers have the same problem with the Audigy on KR7A motherboards. Neither ABIT nor us have any viable solution for now ; it seems KR7A boards damage Audigy ones. We are currently working with ABIT to solve this problem; unfortunately, we
haven't been able to reproduce it yet."
KR7A(-RAID) only: Several reports that the combination of an older 3COM network interface card (NIC), including the 3Com 3C905B-TXM card, and Audigy can result in problems, including damage to Audigy cards. Use of other NIC brands apparently resolves this problem. Note that this is not true of all 3Com cards: I have an Audigy, KR7A-RAID and 3COM 3C905C NIC with no problems at all and several users have emailed to say that they too have no problems with this combination.
KR7A(-RAID) only: One report that the combination of the Cardexpert Gainward ti/500 GeForce 2 and Audigy can result in problems, including damage to Audigy cards.
New KR7A(-RAID) only: Some users believe that the cause of the problem is the combination of ACPI 2.0 compliant motherboards (such as the KR7A-RAID) and the use of a non-ACPI-compliant (but power-management enabled) PCI card in the system. See here for a long thread about the issue. A work around is install Windows as a standard PC (not ACPI) - see "What is ACPI?" in the miscellaneous section for details of how to do this.
New KR7A(-RAID) only: There are reports that Creative Support have unofficially stated that the 'ID's' for the Audigy card seem to get scrambled. There is an EEPROM chip on the card which contains information on what particular card it is, model etc and a few feature codes. The data on the EEPROM somehow get's scrambled during a dmi pool (ESCD etc) update on a lot of VIA platforms - as has been shown mainly when there is an older network card in the system
KG7(-RAID) only: There are several AMD761 chipset options that affect the behaviour of the PCI bus that ABIT have chosen not to make available to the user through the BIOS. Of particular interest here are PCI Delay Transaction, PCI Ordering Rules and Target Latency Rules. By default ABIT disable these three options, resulting in a PCI bus that is not fully PCI 2.2 compliant - although potentially marginally faster. By enabling these three options we can force the PCI bus to be fully PCI 2.2 compliant and this can help resolve crackling problems. As we cannot do this through the BIOS we must use WPCREDIT and WPCRSET to modify the registers from within Windows. These are available on the downloads page. You must modify two registers: 4C and 84. Using WPCREDIT, modify bits 1 and 2 of register 4C to be set (to 1) and bit 2 of register 84 to be set. Leave the other bits unchanged. In hex this means setting register 4C to 07h and 84 to 9Eh. WPCREDIT only makes this change until the next reboot. If this appears to resolve the crackling problem, then you may wish to make this a permanent change, in which case you need to use WPCRSET to modify these two registers automatically each time Windows boots.
There is a new unofficial Audigy FAQ here which may also help.

ok well thats your opinion heheh .. unlike you i respect your opinion.

nooo it was an elaboration to make a joke.

Bbesides i don't know but i didn't see the P3 flame up like the AMD chip did. it's on video dude! common fly back down to earth ok lol ...

Amazing how your calling me a troll just because i bought an Intel because i wasn't happy with AMD. Talk about disrespect. You don't see me calling u names do u?