P1Fanatic

Bought Xtreme Gamer 7.1 and installed it the other night. Drivers installed fine but no sound at all which was strange. Played around with Creative settings and I selected game mode - it took an enternity to change and then it suddenly came to life. However later that evening (3hrs or so) my pc just rebooted. When it came back up the card wasnt recognised. Reinstalled drivers but that crashes - tried drivers that came on CD and downloaded latest ones from Creative. Different driver installations but both still crash.

Have now reinstalled windows xp from scratch but same problem. Ive tried moving card to 2 different PCI slots with no success. Tried installing it before any other drivers and after everything else installed. No difference. Windows shows a "Multimedia Audio Controller" fitted but not working. Im pretty much stuck on options now and beginning to think the card is duff.

Any suggestions to try before I RMA it? If I had a spare machine Id try it in that. I do have vista running on another partition but Im a bit loathe to try it there as well in case it kills that like it did with XP.

Cheers,
Simon

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

creative drivers are not the best in the world, but they don't tend to kill your windows installation. Granted they may on rare occasions mess things around a little, so you may need to use a software utility to remove the drivers and start over.

Have a look on their site to make sure you have the most up to date drivers for your particular card. Try that to see how things are.

If the computer is crashing when playing games, then it may be the game or something else.

Phil Harrison

I had mega-problems when I bought a new PC about 6 months ago (upgrading to Core Duo and GTX8800). Have you run DxDiag to see what it says? You get a number of test facilities when you call up the "Sound" report.

In my case the card was 'emulated' which, of course, it shouldn't be, and distorted continually. In the final analysis, it turned out to be a MoBo fault: to keep costs down the OEM (Evesham) had used a PCI-to-SATA controller which was unsuitable, with all sorts of consequences; and they eventually replaced MoBo with a different Make/model and a different PCI/SATA controller.

Oh, and make sure any onboard sound chips are disabled.

I agree that Creative drivers are not well written. So would Creative, if you were to press them hard enough!!!

The only good news I have is that my (separate D-Drive) Vista installation does also work with the card, tho' you require different drivers.

Not much help.... but tea and sympathy!!

Phil Harrison

P1Fanatic

Thats just it - its a clean install of XP and Ive tried installing the card first before any other drivers are loaded and same thing. And its not that the card crashes in games etc - its just not recognised. I have latested drivers.

Im in contact with CL support but my own last options appear to be to a) see if I can install this card in a mates pc to at least prove the card is ok. If it is then maybe try updating my motherboard BIOS to latest beta version (already have latest production one albeit 2 yrs old now).

The amount of problems on the net Ive seen with Nforce4 mobo chipsets (multiple mobo manufacturers) and X-fi cards is astonishing. I really didnt know that CL were so crap in terms of drivers. It seems when they work these cards are brilliant - but often they dont.

Simon

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

Yeah, you would think that driver issues for sound cards would be all over by now. However, we know better. I switched to X-Fi, and for two years I had to endure sound issues in games, so much so I had to rely on onboard audio for gaming. Happily this is now sorted, but what a wait.

If Creative say their card is compatible with your mobo, but its not, just send it back. The question is what to replace it with

andrewdelvard

So how have you gone on with this? To state an obvious one, did you disable the onboard card?

P1Fanatic

Yep in the BIOS and obviously no drivers installed for it as clean xp install.

Tbh Ive given up at the mo as was starting to annoy me. Later in the week I will try installing in Vista and see if same probs. If so then I will ask a mate to install in a spare machine.

Simon

andrewdelvard

OK another obvious one, Is the PSU big enough? Enough power?

P1Fanatic

460w X-Pro running AMD x2 3800, two hard drives (1 raptor), 1dvd rw drive, single 8800gt. Should be fine for that. Runs a sb live 5.1 on top of that ok and I cant imagine an x-fi uses that much more power - the thing is tiny.

Let me see if it works in Vista or not as that will be a good test. In XP it literally sees the card but reports a hardware failure, no IRQ assigned etc. Strange thing is that it worked ok for first 3 hours of use and now I cant even get windows to recognise the thing. Im hoping its just a duff card.

Simon