Sound card suggestions (again)

[VivienM]

I posted about this about six months ago; ended up getting an Asus Xonar DX. But now I'm fed up with that card because after about two weeks of uptime, the right channel goes quiet. Rebooting fixes it. Look around the Asus forums, and it's clearly a problem with the drivers for W7 x64, but Asus seems to have zero intention of fixing it...

So, back to looking for a sound card:
- onboard (Realtek) sound on this mobo, last time I enabled it (before buying the DX), caused BSODs after about two days of uptime. I could try again with newer Realtek drivers, but suspect a hardware problem. And waiting 2-3 days for a BSOD is not my idea of fun...
- there's a first-gen Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty sitting in a closet somewhere. Had horrible troubles under Vista x64 with > 4GB RAM on a different board with that thing, so a little hesitant to try it out under W7. There's also an even older first-gen SB Audigy in a closet...
- the Creative X-Fi Titanium HD looks schweeeeeet, and it seems like Creative fixed their Vista/7 driver issues, but... $150 CAD is a little steep. But until their x64 drivers pissed me off, I was a Creative loyalist, so...

Really, I'm looking for something middle of the range, with good stable drivers and ideally a PCI-E interface.

Any suggestions?

 

[Anubis]

my orig edition X-Fi has no issues in W7 64, its worth trying before spending money

 

[VivienM]

my orig edition X-Fi has no issues in W7 64, its worth trying before spending money

Good to hear... and I may very well do that. Three questions:
1) What drivers are you running? The latest from Creative's site?
2) How much RAM do you have? Mine ran great in Vista x64 with 3GB, it's when I added more RAM that it got flakey.
3) How often do you (re)boot? A lot of these problems seem to crop up only if you don't reboot daily...

 

[VivienM]

I got fed up, put the X-Fi in.

Hope it doesn't need external power if you're not putting in the X-Fi drive...

 

[f4phantom2500]

i remember hearing about x-fi problems with vista 64, but i never ran vista...my x-fi xtrememusic performs without any issues in win 7 64.

looks like i'm using creative's driver # 6.0.1.1373

you should be good to go with the x-fi you have. don't shell out $150 for what is essentially the same card; any driver fixes that they've come out with since will work as well on your old x-fi as your new one...unless your old x-fi has a hardware problem.

 

[ramj70]

I haven't had any problems with my x-fi and W7 64. I'm using driver version 6.0.1.1373. I had 4GB previously and it ran with no problems and I just switched to 8GB and there are no problems.

 

[Anubis]

Good to hear... and I may very well do that. Three questions:
1) What drivers are you running? The latest from Creative's site?
2) How much RAM do you have? Mine ran great in Vista x64 with 3GB, it's when I added more RAM that it got flakey.
3) How often do you (re)boot? A lot of these problems seem to crop up only if you don't reboot daily...

1) doubt they are the latest, put this comp together over a year ago. so whatever drivers existed then on creatives site

2)6 gigs

3) less then once a week

never had an issue with the card in vista 64 either

 

[f4phantom2500]

1) doubt they are the latest, put this comp together over a year ago. so whatever drivers existed then on creatives site

2)6 gigs

3) less then once a week

never had an issue with the card in vista 64 either

oh yeah...i'm running 4 gigs of ram, but was running 2 gigs for over a year with no problems. usually reboot every couple days or so, maybe longer, maybe shorter.

 

[hennessy1]

I currently use the halo claro card. They recently came out with an e-claro card for pci-e. HTOmega is the vendor and they have extremely stable drivers.

 

[VivienM]

So far, my old X-Fi card is running great...

I had big trouble with Vista x64 where the sound would just die. Toggling the card from entertainment to gaming mode and back would 'reboot' it and it would work again... for a few hours. It seemed to mostly happen after I upgraded the RAM from 3 to 6 gigs. Very annoying, though in a way LESS annoying (because it was 'easy' to fix) than the Asus right channel cutting out until a reboot.

So far, this isn't happening with W7 x64, the latest drivers, and a different board (P43/ICH10R instead of my old i975X/ICH7R P5W DH Deluxe). But it's only been three days, and I generally don't consider something stable unless it works for a month or so without rebooting...