Thinking of upgrading Audigy 2 ZS to X-Fi in Vista

[Belzebutt]

I get frequent sound studdering and crackling in games, most recently Crysis, and I've tried all kinds of things but it keeps happening. I use an Audigy 2 ZS. So now I'm thinking of just throwing money at the problem and getting an X-Fi. The drivers seem to be a lot more recent than for the Audigy, and there's also a PCIE version which I'm thinking of getting.

Will the PCIE version fit into a 8x PCIE slot, even though these slots are much longer?

I heard many sound issues (including in the X-Fi) are caused by PCI latency, is there any way to tweak that in Vista?

 

[Nenu]

Sounds like you have an NForce 4 motherboard, they have the most issues with Creatives cards.
The X-Fi series cards suffer these issues too.
If so, throw money at another non NForce 4 mobo instead.

If you do get another soundcard, dont get the PCI-E version, they dont have a sound processor so you get a max of EAX 2.0 and all sounds are processed by your CPU.

 

[Belzebutt]

If you do get another soundcard, dont get the PCI-E version, they dont have a sound processor so you get a max of EAX 2.0 and all sounds are processed by your CPU.

Don't you have to do that under Vista anyway? I thought all hardware acceleration is basically gone under Vista, so what's the point of getting an accelerated sound card?

 

[Nenu]

Don't you have to do that under Vista anyway? I thought all hardware acceleration is basically gone under Vista, so what's the point of getting an accelerated sound card?

So that you can use hardware acceleration.
Where did you read that it isnt used any more?