I Hate X-Fi's.

AaronP

AaronP

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Jan 13, 2005
Messages
11,527
Okay I officially hate the X-Fi series. I've had 3 X-Fi cards, 2 XtremeMusics and 1 Fatal1ty. I RMA'd the Fatal1ty and they sent me back a XtremeMusic! :mad: Today my backup XtremeMusic shit the brick so I decided to use the RMA'd XtremeMusic and sure enough it starts having the classic "Crackling" issues that the X-Fi series is known for.

I'm going to RMA these 2 cards and sell them on eBay and buy a sound card that isn't made by Creative. :mad:
 
Out of curiosity, what are the specs of your PC.

CPU, mainboard, power supply, and graphics card?
 
Met-AL said:
Out of curiosity, what are the specs of your PC.

CPU, mainboard, power supply, and graphics card?
Click to expand...

OCZ GameXtream 700W Power Supply
AMD Opteron 165 @ 3Ghz
DFI nForce 4 UT Lanparty Motherboard
NVIDIA Geforce 7900GTX 512MB

1 card causes crashes and bluescreens in both Vista and XP and the other has crackling issues. The Fatal1ty before it had crackling issues as well. I've trouble shot these cards plenty of time with other people to know that it's the actual cards and not something else.
 
Have you flashed your motherboard bios to the latest one?
Few of the manufacturers updated the bios that addresses this issue.
 
Yep, most likely its the mainboard causing this, probably PCI latency timing or something else. The nForce 4 boards all had this, but like posted above, BIOS updates fixed it.
 
Meh creative sucks. They care more about buzz words than sound quality and "features" that screw it up in the process. As soon as I see a card that interests me I'm dumping my X-fi. The Auzentech card looks ok.. just ok though not worth my attention. Hopefully some company figures out that audiophiles use computer too and capitalize on the situation. One upstart company with enough quality and word of mouth could knock creative down.
 
Met-AL said:
Yep, most likely its the mainboard causing this, probably PCI latency timing or something else. The nForce 4 boards all had this, but like posted above, BIOS updates fixed it.
Click to expand...

Trust me I wouldn't look over something so simple, the bios is the latest available one and I've tried these cards in other systems. The one that went bad first lasted about a year before shitting the brick, and the other one lasted all of 2 hours.
 
Wow, that is so strange. What are the odds of one person getting 3 bad cards in a row? Incredible.

So what are you going to get for a card now?

I see that you have a pretty nice overclock. What is your PCI bus running at? Is it actually locked in at 33mhz?
 
StaticSurge said:
Meh creative sucks. They care more about buzz words than sound quality and "features" that screw it up in the process. As soon as I see a card that interests me I'm dumping my X-fi. The Auzentech card looks ok.. just ok though not worth my attention. Hopefully some company figures out that audiophiles use computer too and capitalize on the situation. One upstart company with enough quality and word of mouth could knock creative down.
Click to expand...

EMU 0404 should suit if your after mainly after an audiophile kinda level sound.
 
Met-AL said:
Wow, that is so strange. What are the odds of one person getting 3 bad cards in a row? Incredible.

So what are you going to get for a card now?

I see that you have a pretty nice overclock. What is your PCI bus running at? Is it actually locked in at 33mhz?
Click to expand...

Locked at 33Mhz, double checked with clockgen and other programs.
 
change the pci latency to 32- u can use a software program called pci latency tool.

worked for me- tho the only game that game me trouble was bf2142
 
I shouldn't have to fiddle around with that kind of crap for a sound card.
 
Its the motherboard, or the overclock. Also a buddy of mine fixed his crackling issue by updating the drivers in windows and relaxing his clock timings. He was overclocked heavily and had issues as well.
 
Seems silly to blame the card(s) when the only factor that's remained the same throughout is the underlying rig..
 
Seems silly to blame the card(s) when the only factor that's remained the same throughout is the underlying rig. If it were me, I'd have reverted to stock for testing purposes and tried the latency changes before even attempting an RMA.
 
Well technically it is actually the card/driver 's fault. Creative should have designed it to be as compatible as it can with a wide variety of setups.
 
m0unds said:
Seems silly to blame the card(s) when the only factor that's remained the same throughout is the underlying rig. If it were me, I'd have reverted to stock for testing purposes and tried the latency changes before even attempting an RMA.
Click to expand...

I have tested it at stock, like I said I have a great deal of experience trouble shooting these cards they really are shitty cards, I'd take a Audigy 2ZS over a X-Fi Fatal1ty any day of the week.
 
The PCI Latency problem with the nForce 4 boards is present at stock.
 
Leon2ky said:
Okay I officially hate the X-Fi series. I've had 3 X-Fi cards, 2 XtremeMusics and 1 Fatal1ty. I RMA'd the Fatal1ty and they sent me back a XtremeMusic! :mad: Today my backup XtremeMusic shit the brick so I decided to use the RMA'd XtremeMusic and sure enough it starts having the classic "Crackling" issues that the X-Fi series is known for.
Click to expand...

Leon2ky said:
OCZ GameXtream 700W Power Supply
AMD Opteron 165 @ 3Ghz
DFI nForce 4 UT Lanparty Motherboard
NVIDIA Geforce 7900GTX 512MB
Click to expand...

Well there's the problem :rolleyes:
 
Can anyone recommend me a high quality sound card for a 64 bit vista OS? Excluding XFIs or Creative?
 
The only other choices is the c-media oxygen HD chipset sound cards. If your using headphones or 2 channel speakers. or using a digital reciver then your fine.

Because in vista the oxygen HD cards will have 5.1 in some games that supports 5.1 in software mode. But if they dont. they will do 2 channel in software mode.

So if your using headphones you can just use dobly headphone. or 2 channel speakers. or a reciver.

But in this case if I was you I would take this chance of upgrading and going to a diffent mobo cpu ram setup. and then Rma all of your cards keep one of them and sell the rest.
 
I feel ur the pain but any heavy OC on this board will cause problems.
Blaming a sound card only because this component is so sensitive to data interruption won't help.
Adjusting PCI latency is a must and actually not a rocket science.
Good Luck.

nb.
People feeling love or hate towards metal objects have always fascinated me :D
 
Sagan said:
Can anyone recommend me a high quality sound card for a 64 bit vista OS? Excluding XFIs or Creative?
Click to expand...

Check out this soundcard. I don't know if they have 64bit Vista driver and I have never heard it but i have read really good things about its audio quality over at headfi.

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/esi-julia/index.html

Well, forget that card. They haven't even put out a new driver for it since 2005.

http://www.esi-pro.com/download.php?mode=view&division=1&pid=43&osid=1&type=1&page=&id=218
 
Sucks. I've had this x-fi platinum for over 3 years, and I've bent pins on it, trashed it over and over when changing PCs etc.. and it still worked great.

Until now. I recently switched to vista x64 and added 2 more GB of ram making 4. In games, I get the dreaded SCP issue. I've moved the card to 3 diff PCI slots, clean install of both the OS and the drivers several times over (driver installs) and to no avail.

However, haven't tried changing the PCI bus latency issue, so I'll give that a shot once I get back in town.
 
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