Speaking of IRQ sharing/possible problems with such

[chizow]

Originally posted by: nerp

Originally posted by: chizow
But its not that simple. If you could find or design a sound card that was as capable as a SB you'd have a point.

Many people have designed such cards. Take a look at m-audio, Turtle Beach, Creamware, Echo, heck, even Chaintech made a decent Envy24 based card a while ago (blows creative fakery out of the water).

The fact that I can power a complete digital recording studio with 4 m-audio cards sharing teh same driver with massive cross-routing, ins and outs and spidfs going nuts controlling MIDI all perfectly in synch, all in perfect harmony, no problems, no clicks, pops, static, lag, delay, latency, etc, means that either creative can't make a card worth a damn or someone is confusing a consumer card for listening to mp3s with professional recording solutions. Nobody in their right mind with professional requirements would use creative.

I was referring to DSP performance in gaming. All of those cards you listed are certainly capable when it comes to simple 16-bit 44.1/44kHZ audio where its just a simple exercise in keeping the original signal fidelity intact. If you dumbed down the X-Fi to handle and pass such signals I'm sure it'd have no problems either (I've never experienced crackling over s/pdif since its simple pass through). Its when you're trying to process 128 hardware voices in real-time in an EAX5 enabled game where you run into latency issues on the PCI bus with certain chipsets, something those other cards cannot and will never be able to do.

 

[nerp]

If this is everyone's fault besides creative, why is creative the one company with the overwhelming majority of problems? Seems like M-Audio has no problems staying within PCI spec. Their performance is no worse for it either.

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: nerp
If this is everyone's fault besides creative, why is creative the one company with the overwhelming majority of problems? Seems like M-Audio has no problems staying within PCI spec. Their performance is no worse for it either.

LOL. Because they're not the only company with problems? Its like the never-ending debate over which video card company has less problems, NV or ATI. You'll find tons of both that have problems if you actually look, but chances are you won't if you're NOT having problems. Combine that with Creative being a "mainstream" sound solution that has been around MUCH longer than anyone else (and survived) and you have a larger sample of potential problems compared to other solutions with less market share. Sad reality is it only takes one poor experience with a company to write them off forever but never give them credit for the positive experiences, which is what you see in the attitudes of all the Creative haters out there.

And please don't confuse the M-Audio with any Creative card in terms of "performance" when it comes to gaming. The Revolution was certainly a great card with vanilla CD/DVD quality audio (16-bit) but you can't compare the two when it comes to gaming. Again, the difference between audio/movies compared to gaming is the goal of one exercise is to keep the original audio fidelity intact and the other is to manipulate it into something very different. The X-Fi and even the Audigy 2+ parts did the former as well or better than the Revolution but clearly pull ahead in terms of gaming. Any review will substantiate this.

 

[Steve]

chizow, your reputation precedes you

BTRY B 529th FA BN, PCs have 128KB of option ROM space for bootable devices. Your video card, SCSI card, and SATA controller are going to take up portions of this, and if they add up to more than 128, you're busted.

What kind of video card is it? EDIT: Just saw the other thread.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Thanks for the reply. I purchased a 29320LPE to do some trouble shooting - didn't end up working but found this out. When I installed the controller, I tried booting without the dual channel controller card (39320-R) or the drive hooked up. All onboard SATA controllers were set to RAID, machine booted up, the 3132 Silicon Image bios posted, then came the Adaptec 29320LPE bios, then came the ULI M1575 RAID bios... so i figured I may have gotten somewhere. As soon as I got the drivers loaded into the OS for the LPE controller and took the drive off the 39320-R (and also removing the card) I plugged into the new card, booted up, and none of the onboard controllers worked. I think you are right about "Buuusted!" hah - only if my GF was big busted