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[TimMedcalf]

After running two soundcards/speakersets for several years (one for games, one for music) i decided that 12 speakers dotted around my small PC room was getting silly - so i decided to upgrade!

This is what i was going from...

1) Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS / Dell 5650 5.1 Surround Set (Gaming)
2) M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 / Cambridge Soundworks DTT2500 Speakers (Still the most musical PC speakers i've ever heard!)

Since i was not willing on dropping audio quality, i decided to go for the "best" (yeah....okay, i may not have chosen right!)...i went for the Soundblaster X-Fi Elite Pro and the Gigaworks S750 THX 7.1 System. All in, it was about £450 - (about $850 in funny money)

Flushed with the excitement of my new purchase i installed the card....then found the PC wouldn't boot. I don't know if i'd got a spark somehow, but the mobo was dead. One (not entirely truthful) call to Dell Service Center and a replacement board is on the way.

Two days later, the board is in, the card is in...but installing the drivers causes a BSOD.

Okay, download the latest drivers....install them......BSOD.

Bugger.

Then i notice that as the BIOS is finishing doing whatever BIOS's do, it reports an error message "Error Allocating Mem Bar for PCI Device". This is a new message that disappears when the new SB card is taken out. A check on google shows that i'm in a very small minority of people who have got this message, and no-one really knows how to sort it.

Dell Knowledge-base says a card is causing a conflict...but the same happens when all other PCI cards are removed. It then helpfully suggest removing the offending card...which isn't much use at all.

Tried everything....fiddled in BIOS, upgraded BIOS, switched switches, jumped jumpers...still no joy.

Dell don't care...Creative don't respond....

8 days later and the glow of "new toy" is rapidly wearing off!

I'm giving Creative one more day before i call their "local" support line (which actually happens to be in a different country...but what the hey, its still Europe, it must be near!) - but i doubt i'll get anywhere.

Ho hum...

BTW - the Gigaworks Speakers look amazing - the Sub is big enough to house a small family, with room left over for their dog and two  gerbils. I just hope it sounds as beefy as it looks.

[glynor]

The X-Fi cards have been widely reported to be suffering all kinds of problems.  If possible, I'd probably return it and stick with your trusty old Audigy (or grab a nice M-Audio or Audigy2/4 card).

Check this stuff:
http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/9994
http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/05/20/huge-creative-x-fi-problems/
http://www.elitebastards.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12379&highlight=xfi+problem
http://www.driverheaven.net/showthread.php?t=114989&highlight=x-fi+problem

[TimMedcalf]

Cheers for the info Glynor.

I guess i just thought Creative = Reliable since i'd never had problems before. But it looks like the X-Fi has big problems!

I still haven't got the stuff sorted, so will be returning the card ASAP.

Oh well...guess i'll be looking at the M-Audio now. (or sticking to my old audigy 2!)

[glynor]

I have to say...

I have three discreet sound cards:

an Audigy 2 (Standard edition) in my HTPC -- fairly decent for music/audio.  Great for gaming.
an M-Audio Revolution 5.1 in my "desktop" PC -- great for general audio/movies/music playback.  just so-so for gaming.
an M-Audio Delta 44 -- great for sound production

[TimMedcalf]

That sounds like the kind of config i was moving from!

I decided to consolidate it into one card with one speakerset - that hopefully combined the best of both worlds.

Thats why i went for the X-Fi - Creative would always be good for gaming and the new card was supposed to be top sound quality too.

However, since that seems to be a dead end,  i'm either just gonna use my Audigy 2 ZS for both (the ramp up in sound quality now it's paired with the Gigaworks speakers is acceptable for music playback), or i was thinking of the M-Audio Revolution 7.1.

Out of interest, how come the Revolution 5.1 is only "so-so" for gaming? whats it lacking?

[kzrebel]

Did you try moving the card to another slot? BIOS allocates memory & I/O space starting from slot furthest from power supply (slot 6)? I've seen this type of conflict before (overlapping option ROM space).
If it doesn't help, I might suggest another sound card: Auzentech X-Meridian. I replaced my X-Fi Elite Pro with one of these. Nice sound! Even better than Elite Pro!!

[TimMedcalf]

Did you try moving the card to another slot?

Yep! I tried it in every slot i could find (cue extremely poor smutty joke).

The annoying thing is that it sometimes worked in a particular slot...but by the next reboot it had developed the same problem. Its probably faulty, but after spending a looooong time on this i just want rid of it. I'll see whether they want me to try a replacement card....but money back would be my preferred route.

Cheers for the suggestion of the Auzentech...i'll check it out! (not heard of it before!)

[glynor]

Out of interest, how come the Revolution 5.1 is only "so-so" for gaming? whats it lacking?

I've had a few games that would refuse to do "3D" surround sound with the Revolution.  It's only a very few, but some of them gave only the option "2 channel sound" or "hardware 3D sound" with no in-between.  I think one example of one of these games is Need for Speed: Underground, which does have the Creative EAX splash at the beginning I believe (I think one of them was that one, but I'm not sure).  I'm extremely suspicious that this was done "on purpose" at the behest of Creative, since the "hardware acceleration" for EAX gains you at best 5-7% CPU performance back, so they need some reason for people to buy it...

Either way, with a handful of games I had to "fake" surround sound using CMSS on the M-Audio board.  This was, admittedly, back when the Audigy 2 (pre-ZS) was the state-of-the-art from Creative though so it's quite possible that a LOT has changed since then.  I'm actually using the onboard sound on my ASUS A8R32-MVP motherboard in one of my machines and I've been quite pleasantly surprised by the quality and compatibility.  Of course, it is a pretty high-end $260-at-launch motherboard (and it uses the ALC888 HD Audio chip from RealTek)...

This is not to say I don't love my Revo 5.1.  I certainly do!  And the vast majority of the games I play work just fine with it...

[goatherder]

Man I didn't realise that posts move really slowly on this subforum. Hope whatever it was that you sorted it out.

[TimMedcalf]

Well i did finally get it sorted...but only about a week ago!! It took nearly two months to get it resolved - although xmas being in the middle of it didn't help.

The creative support guys offered to send me a replacement card, once i'd sent mine back. This took about a month to happen since the xmas post slowed everything down. Until i got the replacement card i was running the new Gigaworks speakers off my old Audigy 2 ZS and they were sounding great!

So i finally got the new X-FI to install. Switched everything off, swapped the cards, booted up and.....no sound was coming out some of the speakers. Checked every setting, checked every connection. The X-FI was producing the correct sounds in the correct channels - but the Gigaworks AMP (the subwoofer) just wasn't working right. This was weird since they had been working perfectly for a month...but the second i swapped the card the speakers broke. (and trust me...i was very careful about making sure things were switched off and disconnected when they should've been! )

So i look on the X-FI forums, seems i'm not alone! These subs have a habit of doing this.

One "stern" email to Creative later and a new Sub is on its way! Except when it arrives it seems they've sent the WHOLE package - Sub, Sats, Cables etc...and they didn't need me to send anything back. (So know i've got a spare Gigaworks s750 system...apart from the sub doesn't work right! I'm sure someone who knows what they're doing could get it working again!).

Anyway...the replacement sub works fine. The system sounds fantastic. I'm not convinced the some of the new features (24bit Crystalizer etc) do much worth having. They just seem to do what every audio exciter does (boost the volume, high-frequenies and low frequencies) but the general sound of the card is amazing!

So i'm happy at the moment - but i'm not convinced how long it will last! Hopefully there was a known manufacturing problem with the subs that have now been sorted...but you never know, the system could just blow up at any moment!