Sound card problems

[eyor]

Can anyone help me? I am at a loss as to what is wrong here. I just built a computer(check my sig) and it was working perfectly. I bought a Montego A3DXstream sound card, and it is quite troublesome. The computer is constantly freezing. At this point it freezes immediately upon entering windows. It used to freeze when I tried testing it, or when I tried to start up unreal tournament, or at a random point. I thought it might be due to IRQ conflicts, so I have tried changing IRQs around, and haver tried three different slots for the card. Then I thought it might be a driver problem. The CD seemed to only have windows 95/NT drivers on it. I downloaded the latest drivers on the internet and installed them. Still no luck. At one point there was a yellow exclamation point over the sound card in the system properties, but I was able to make that go away, and the properties stated that there were no IRQ conflicts and no hardware conflicts. What is with this sound card?
Thanks

 

[Bakwetu]

Did you dl the vortex reference drivers (2048)? Check out this thread

 

[frail]

I have the same card, with the same probs you have (or so it seems).
It used to be as bad as you've explained, but I kept fooling around with drivers, etc so now it only freezes under 2 circumstances.

1) When i'm running winamp and I go to click on something (sometimes on the first try, usually 5max before I get it to freeze). Ex. Winamp is playing a song and I go to click IE on my tool bar by the start menu.

2) Running Real Player, video or audio. Between a few sec up to a few min, it'll always freeze my machine.

I'm pretty sure I dropped something on the card, or damaged it. I don't know, maybe it's a common prob.

 

[sd]

can you simply get a different sound card? not exactly solving your problem, but it sounds like your gonna experience intermittant issues. why deal with the headaches? is there something special with that card that you need?

 

[eyor]

I still seem to be having problems!
Unreal Tournament will not play. Also, I am a bit confused about that reference driver thing. I am not supposed to use the drivers that come with the card? it said I did not need any reference drivers. I downloaded the vortex 2048 drivers you linked to, and installed them. But the computer has no idea what they are and does not use them. am I supposed to install the normal drivers and the reference drivers? also, on the cd that came with the card it does not list windows 98 drivers. I actually downloaded some that I found and installed those, but it still freezes. I tried Unreal Tournament in safe mode with just the sound card disabled, and it worked fine.
This is so frustrating!

frail: can you be more specific about your foolings with the drivers?

sd: I got the card because it had excellent reviews. I could not find a single bad comment about it. PC Magazine, CNet, GamePC, 3D Hardware, 3D SoundSurge, Smart Computing... all said it was great for gaming, and I was able to pick it up for ~$20.

Well, if anyone can provide further help, you will have my undying gratitude!

 

[eyor]

now I have uninstalled the drivers and the computer is still freezing sometimes.... grr... frustrating.

 

[eyor]

Update: it still doesn't seem to be working.

 

[PowerJoe]

Is 20$ worth all this wasted time? Get a different card, and be done with it already!

Edit: my on-board, "free" C-Media CM8738 works great, in both Win98 and Win2K (it's better under Win2K, though).

-PJ

 

[eyor]

But there must be a reason this is happening. has anyone else ever had this sound card?

 

[eyor]

Son of a switch! I just read that the a3d is not compatible with the kt133 chipset. #$@W%$! any fixes for this?
should I return the card? only thing is, I got it from buy.com and used a coupon. will they take away the coupon money if i returned this? what alternative card is reccomended? sb live?

 

[eyor]

I emailed turtle beach... waiting for reply

 

[Grey]

Eyor let me know if you get a reply. I emailed Diamond and they never got back to me on my Aureal K133 problems..

 

[sandorski]

Use a PCI slot that doesn't share IRQ's, get the reference drivers from Aureal(make sure to get the correct drivers, is the card a Vortex2 or Vortex1?), and disable SB DOS emulation.

 

[Grey]

I have a Soundblaster S90 Aureal Version 8820 I believe. I used the includes drivers from windows98 CD.. It give me PCI error and shuts down.

 

[eyor]

I just talked to a tech person at Turtle Beach. It seems the Montego A3DXstream and Montego 2 cards aren't compatible with Athlon mobos. Grrr. Well, the question now is: what do I do with this card and what card to I get instead? SB Live Value?

 

[LordSandMan]

Eyor , I was having the same problems with a vortex 2 on my KT7-Raid. I got tired of messing with it and bought an SBlive gamer. Where did you see it wasn't compatible with KT133? I need to prove to my friend that I wasn't doing something wrong. The SBLive works great after i figured a few problems out. If you get one take a look at one of my previous posts. I think it's titled "SBLive and UT problems" or something like that.

 

[eyor]

here is what the tech person said:


<<
The Montego A3DXstream will NOT function properly in motherboards
that use this newer Bus architecture as well as in motherboards designed
for use with the AMD Athlon processor. >>


I forget where, but I read that there were problems specifically with the Vortex and KX133 chipset, which is very similar to the KT133, I think. But if it was the SBLive that was giving you problems, wouldnt the xgamer or whatever still be troublesome? what chip does it have?

I was thinking of getting a sblive value to replace this one, does anyone know if this would be any good for gaming? Thanks.

 

[LordSandMan]

I think the SBLive Value and the SBLive x-gamer are the same card, just different software bundle or something. I just wanted to get a card right away so I ended up paying a little more for it. Yes, i think the value would end up with the same problems, but you can get around that. see if you can find my post from early today on the UT problems.

 

[Grey]

I gave up on my Aureal card, bought a MP3 5.1 Live! tonight. Working good so far in tribes, which is all I care about.

 

[sandorski]

Have you tried my suggestions? Don't do anything until you have.

Take Turtle Beach's comments with a grain of salt, many kt/kx and Vortex soundcard owners have perfectly stable systems. You just have to set things up properly before the combo will work.

 

[ERJ]

I have the same problem here (except vortex 1). My machine will randomly lock up when doing any sound related activities. My roomate had the same problem with his vortex 1 based sound card with the KT7. I just ordered a SBLive 5.1. I hated to do it but we were never able to solve his problem and I don't see any hope for solving mine (I have screwed around with it quite a bit).

ERJ

 

[Bakwetu]

Eyor
First fix your irq conflict (if you have any).
Boot in safe mode and remove any duplicate soundcard entries in control panel-> system and also remove the old sound card drivers.
Install the 2048 reference drivers.

When I used my g400 graphics card my machine worked flawlessly, but after I installed a geforce mx I have also been having some soundcard problems in Rune and Deus ex (both use the Unreal engine). I have temporarily solved this by disabling d3dsound in the games .ini files (&quot;usedirectsound false&quot; instead of true). All other games I have tried have worked with the 2048 drivers

My system: Athlon 700@900 on Asus k7v, Xitel storm platinum soundcard, hercules mx @205/205, 128 mb Apacher pc133 ram etc...

 

[eyor]

I don't see any irq conflicts. I disabled soundblaster emulation, I 2048 drivers or something, but when I try to install them it simply copies all of the files and then ignores them. If it pops up a message about a sound card found and I point it to the reference drivers it doesnt make the connection. Whats all this about vortex 1 / vortex 2?

 

[sandorski]

First, windows will not report an IRQ conflict, you must check to see if IRQ's are being shared with the sound card. If they are then it won't work.

Second, the 2048 drivers are for Vortex2(A3D1.0, 2.0, 3.0)cards. If you have a Vortex 1 card, then you'll need the reference drivers for Vortex1 cards. This is probably why the drivers are being ignored.

 

[eyor]

Well, this is an a3d card I thought, but maybe I do have the wrong drivers. Can anyone point to the exact ones that I should use for a Montego A3DXstream sound card? And I have tried three different slots, and changed IRQs in BIOS. But what did you mean about not being able to check for IRQ conflicts?