P4G8X / SB Audigy 2 / = Nightmare

[JK71062]

I bought a SB Audigy 2 on Saturday and since that time I have been reformatting and reloading XP. I had a turtle beach santa cruz installed and working except for a small pop sometimes. I uninstalled all drivers then installed the audigy, then the software, ran the supplied diagnostics and they say all is fine, except I get no sound whatsoever. Then I read on the net about APIC?, tried to change that setting and lost the whole damn OS. So no big deal, reload XP. Well I spent all day Sunday trying to get the thing to boot from the SATA drive with all kinds of problems, finally got the thing reloaded by disconnecting the power to my other 2 drives on the 1st IDE channel. this time I disabled the APIC setting in bios, changed it to PIC. reinstalled XP, reinstalled the Audigy, still no sound, diagnostics say all is fine. uninstalled and reinstalled the Audigy 3 or 4 more times, moving it from PCI slot to PCI slot, tried setting IRQ's manually. Finally, after 12 or 13 hours I had enough and walked away. Today I called Creative Support and was told to try plugging my speakers into different jacks.......duh? Anyone else have any problems remotely close to this?

So far I have tried
1 Moving the Audigy to different PCI slots
2 Reassigning IRQ's
3 Reloaded XP with ACPI changed to PIC in bios
4 Download and installed latest Creative drivers (WDM)
5 Flashed Bios to 1007
6 per Creative, tried switching to different jacks.


Asus P4G8X Deluxe.
P4 3.06 533 FSB, HT enabled.
1024 MB DDR PC2100 running dual channel.
Abit Siluro FX5600 256 MB DDR
Maxtor 80 GB on SATA (boot drive)
Maxtor 60GB and 15 GB on 1st IDE channel
2 cdrw drives on 2nd IDE channel

onboard sound disabled in bios
onboard lan enabled
onboard sata enabled
onboard 1394 disabled

Frustration factor = maxed out

[januszmn]

I have the almost the same problem
I'll upgrade when the P5 64 comes.

My system config
P4 2.0 @ 2.1
ASUS P4T-E
512 RDRAM
Hercules 3d Prophet III
SB Audigy EX
Intel 100Pro VE (NIC)
Seagate 120gb (master/boot)
WD 40GB (slave)
ZIP 250
Pioneer DVR-A06U/106D (recently bought)

I'v been down that road and as you can see, I build a house there.

The SB Audigy and Audigy 2 have ancient architecture.
They were created over 10 years ago. Creative just keeps changing the chips, chipset, adding ports, extending the card, and making the transfers out of better metal to increase db and decrease noise. Brush off all the glued and stapled garbage on the card and you see the origional Sound Blaster Pro 16.

To properly configure the card you need to tweek the bios and then reinstall windows.

True, creative makes the best cards, but they are incompatible with windows XP.

Compare

Windows XP optimal
NTFS all drives
DMA on all
ATA 100+
APIC

SB Audigy
Windows
PIC
PIC affects NTFS so you have to use FAT32
DMA
ATA 100+

I seriously don’t know. If you want, just complain and complain to Sound blaster North America.

Also, western digital are the worst hard drives in existence.
The bearings screw up after a year or so, just enough to get out of warranty range. I bought a 40gb ATA 66 a couple years back and I started grinding but they sent me an ATA 100 so it didn’t work on my old comp and now I just use it as a DVD image storage drive. ***I also had a 120gb and it started grinding and the diagnostic software only caught the problems after I formatted it, this burned out in about a year and a half. They replaced it. I am selling the drive on ebay since I have the Seagate now. All of the drives have a warranty of 1 year now so Ill see what happens with the Seagate. IBM is the only company with a 3 year warranty.

Another thing, NVIDIA is a bad company, they have now way of contacting them and they usually stop support for older cards.
My Hercules will not run on new drivers.
I’m still without sound; here maybe you can figure something out,
go to http://dmzweb3.europe.creative.com/S...reative_cli_en
Solution ID # 5265
If the link doesnt work search for the creative solution ID or got the the creative, north america web site and to support and then knowledge base. Put SID5265 in the knowledge base search engine.

[tazman1937]

Wow, i cannot agree more iwth what all of you have said.

Sorry, i have no idea how to fix that audigy problem, but i would try (if you already ditched XP) wiping your HD clean with a boot disk of partition magic or something. This helped me a ton- formatting over the old 1's and 0's seems to make new installs go faster and better.

My maxtor had already exceeded it's 1-year warranty to THREE YEARS i was amazed. Then it crashed HUGE, one day, i turn it on, and poof, no more HD. NOt even a recognizeable IDE device now thats sad. I went through a shitty WD after just over a year and didnt get ym damn warranty, and i almost bought a seagate, but i went the extra mile and bought a 60gb IBM. It runs quiet, cool, and has performed beter than the other 3, even though the seek time is the same. And, the warranty hasnt run out.

ALso, after i lost my first HD, i called creative cuz i didnt have the driver cd for my SBLive!value crap sound card, and they dont offer it on thier website. Thier freaking tech support is ****, they were not helpful and weanted me to buy a new one.

Also, i had a 3d prophet IISE, which is compatible with these new device drivers Nvidia offers. I instaleld them, and got majorly screwed, and i called them and they stopped offering tech support for it. I was so mad!

Anyway, i feell you guys on that on.






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