Just went W7 64 on my primary workstation and there isn't a driver on earth that I have yet to try that will fix the scratchy sound. Best I can tell, it's just an incompatibility issue with the card and the OS, plain and simple. It's a Creative X-Fi and they're not even offering support for that card anymore to the best of my google-empowered knowledge. So, what's worth looking at?
creative sucks. im running an auzentech but i think it uses creative device drivers. my daily boot into OS is windows 2k8 server 32 bit. on that OS there is a trick of reducing the amount of memory the OS sees that stops a lot of the issues. you have to set it at something less than 4 gigs. my main work server has 8 gigs. Works on wink2k8 server 64 bit though. botttom line, they all suck. what im running is the server version of windows 7 more or less.
Creative kind of blows. Their support for W7 is almost nil. People have had all kinds of trouble with Creative and W7. My simple 7.1 SE Audigy works fine, but it's one of few that does. Go with said Auzentech, or with Asus' Xonar cards.
There isnt much legacy support for this nForce 4 board either All things considered, CS5 64 bit LightRoom and Photoshop are running like a champ -- love that larger scratch disk!
I learned fucking years ago that creative sucks. I had an original athlon (slot A) system with a SB Live. I wanted to kill everyone in that company trying to make that card work
I pour one out whenever I think of what Creative did to Aureal. Aureal had some really cool tech that kind of died with them.
I have this card in my gaming machine and it works great! Sound quality is awesome and it comes with a decent enough interface for controlling EQ settings and such. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829132013
am i the only one that buys mobos w/ built in hd audio and optical out? I've never had an issue, and i run optical out to my receiver
no...I do the same. in having a conversation last night with Alex: him: I need a new sound card me: they still make sound cards? I thought they were all built into mobos now. :rofl:
Don't hate Creative too much, W7 and Vista radically changed the sound interface. Directsound is basically dead now. There is no hardware level access to sound thru a Directx Directsound interface. Microsoft wanted to isolate their kernal from as many drivers as they could, including sound drivers from other vendors; in the name of reliability.
I hear good things about the Asus cards. That is what I have been looking into getting for myself. I had lots of problems recently with several x-fi cards under XP on a customers machine. I would not buy another Creative card after that.
07, Matt, yeah. On-board sound cards are still good. Who can beat HD 7.1 audio integrated on to a motherboard? I guess the only real pro would be to have less stress on the processor, but depending on the card, also have even better sound quality, for the audiophiles.
I would consider myself a semi-audiophile. I have http://www.sennheiserusa.com/noise-cancelling-headset-computer-gamer-headset-skype-voip_502141 connected to the Asus and there is noticeable difference between onboard and Asus dedicated card. Alex, read some reviews of the Asus board compared to onboard sound cards based on blind listening tests. Here is one to get you started: http://techreport.com/articles.x/14500
The two things that make the biggest difference in sound quality is driver programming and DAC chipset. Creative is about the only player in the game that designs their own proprietary DAC. Everyone else usually uses the same line of C-Media. The only exception are recording sound cards.
drew..it's only recently that chipset manufacturers started giving a shit about sound cards. back in the day you had no hardware acceleration for onboard sound, so they were useless to play games with. everyone wrote game drivers for creative so you were basically stuck with them
I have not used a sound card in years. I did a comparison a while ago between a soundblaster live card vs onboard and found no difference other than added power usage and driver issues. Save yourself the money and just invest in a good mobo. Most decent motherboards have 7.1 capability and optical out.
and if you use the optical out, you're using the DAC in whatever audio system you bought anyways, bypassing most handling. The only trick of that is make sure your gear supports whatever sampling rate the mobo or soundcard is pushing out.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_6 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8E200 Safari/6533.18.5) Replacement motherboard is out of the question as this is a Dell. Not ready to build a new machine yet so a decent quality card will be the ticket here.
Going to get the card that Russ recommended at MicroCenter tonight (2 in stock) and have them price-match NewEgg. Also that particular card qualifies for a $10 MIR from Asus atm. Final price should be $40. Be sweet if MC actually carried any DD2 667 2GB ram as I am looking to max this system out at 8GB to hold me over until I build a new box.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_6 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8E200 Safari/6533.18.5) Smithfield baby! Unfortunately a bios from Dell doesn't exist to let me upgrade the proc on the nforce sli mobo that's in here.
Xonar is working like a champ! Now to order another GTX7800 if I can find one and 2 more sticks of these, I'll be set for 2011! :rofl: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145184 Or I'll just buy this guy: http://www.adorama.com/INKD7000.html and a new friend for him: http://www.adorama.com/TN1116NK.html Ultimately this poor Dell workstation is either going to become the garage computer or the accounting / UPS computer at the shop...once he is replaced of course.