Having real problems picking a Sound Card

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

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Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
160,165
Hi guys,

Well I was going to get either an XFi Xtreme Gamer or an XFi Xtreme Music right after I'd worked out what the difference was. I'd posted on here a while back and you guys said that it used to be problematic with 4Gb of Ram in XP, but this issue had been fixed.

So I made a quick post on the Creative forums to check for compatability with my system. This told me that XFi's and Windows XP with 4Gb remains a complete no and Creative will never fix it.

Whats the story? Will it work or not?

If not, what do I buy instead for around £50?
 
Because no 32Bit OS will ever see 4GB of Ram or indeed use it, so that was unneccesary to start with and perhaps their SCs reflect this?

If you want to get a 'real' sound card without any of the hangups then look at M-Audio. They quite literally walk the floor with other sound card manufacturers and are quite reasonably priced too and hit the £50 bracket on the head.

The 2496 or Revolution range are your friends
 
Butters said:
Because no 32Bit OS will ever see 4GB of Ram or indeed use it, so that was unneccesary to start with and perhaps their SCs reflect this?
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Windows sees, and makes full use of, 3.25Gb of Ram. Nothing in my system right now has an issue with that.

If you want to get a 'real' sound card without any of the hangups then look at M-Audio. They quite literally walk the floor with other sound card manufacturers and are quite reasonably priced too and hit the £50 bracket on the head.

The 2496 or Revolution range are your friends
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Will check them out. Do the have the same gaming features the XFi range does?
 
[TW]Fox;10686371 said:
Windows sees, and makes full use of, 3.25Gb of Ram. Nothing in my system right now has an issue with that.



Will check them out. Do the have the same gaming features the XFi range does?
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They don't.

I had a M-Audio Revolution 5.1 (35 quid on popular auction site) and it was absolutely brilliant. The sound quality was very nice. No gaming features though, only had EAX2 when I tried.
 
The Gamer has lesser quality CAP's and DAC's (google it).

There is no 4GB issue as it was fixed many weeks ago with new driver from Creative.

The Gamer is not as good for Audio listening, but the Music will do both perfect, thats why the software has 3 Modes, Entertainment / Game / Audio Creation.

IMO any many others, if you Game its need be a Creative. (EAX5 and all that).

It was only in Vista and not everyone was affected by it inc myself with 2x2GB or 4x1GB.
 
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There is no 4GB issue as it was fixed many weeks ago with new driver from Creative.

The Gamer is not as good for Audio listening, but the Music will do both perfect, thats why the software has 3 Modes, Entertainment / Game / Audio Creation.

IMO any many otyhers, if you Game its need be a Creative. (EAX5 and all that).

It was only in Vista and not everyone was affected by it inc myself with 2x2GB or 4x1GB.
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The issue has been fixed in vista. But if you use 4gb in xp or xp64 with the standard creative drivers you will find you have no eax.
 
See this is confusing. Everywhere I ask I am given different info - some people on the Creative forums say the XFi 4Gb issue (What is the issue?) is NOT fixed with XP and will never be fixed. Yet you guys say it is fixed?
 
I'm guessing you want a creative card for gaming? If you are listening to music, there a much better cards out there than creative ones. Check out the E-mu 1212m.

For gaming tho, you'll need an x-fi, and I just noticed in your post above that you do mainly gaming, so it's either Vista or 2gb of ram.

I'd go for the 2gb myself... To say I'm not a fan of Vista is an understatement. ;)

FWIW, I play CS:S with my 1212m, and it works fine... You may get more reverb effects and things with an x-fi tho...
 
helmutcheese said:
Correct as there was no XP32/64+4GB issue AFAIK, he obv has his own issue, probably down to Mobo Bios or drivers.
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I do not have a single issue.

Right now, my system works perfectly with 4Gb of Ram. Windows detects and uses 3.25Gb of it. Everything works.

What I would like to know is whether adding an XFi will change this. The people on the Creative forums seem to think it will?

There are no problems with my motherboard.
 
[TW]Fox;10699823 said:
What I would like to know is whether adding an XFi will change this. The people on the Creative forums seem to think it will?
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if the sound card has memory of some kind on it, then it will reduce the amount of system memory XP32 will utilise.
 
Butters said:
Because no 32Bit OS will ever see 4GB of Ram or indeed use it, so that was unneccesary to start with and perhaps their SCs reflect this?

If you want to get a 'real' sound card without any of the hangups then look at M-Audio. They quite literally walk the floor with other sound card manufacturers and are quite reasonably priced too and hit the £50 bracket on the head.

The 2496 or Revolution range are your friends
Click to expand...

Vista32 will see the full 4GB in SP1 as outlined by the updatelog released by MS last week. It won't use all 4GB since 768MB is used by system devices on a 32bit Windows based OS. 4GB is still being seen and used by all systems as a whole regardless of 64bit or 32bit, just on 32bit systems a portion is used by system devices.

This is not really an issue in terms of performance or stability.

The Gamer is not as good for Audio listening, but the Music will do both perfect, thats why the software has 3 Modes, Entertainment / Game / Audio Creation.
Click to expand...

The Gamer has the 3 modes as well and does the exact same as the Music in terms of gaming sounds and music. I'm not a Head-Fi.org jockey but I do enjoy good quality music and sound and the Gamer serves me on sublime levels on the cable, amp and speaker/headphone setup I have. I could not imagine needing any better and I upgraded from a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, one of the finest audio cards ever created.
 
The Soundcard does not effect System Memory, its only your GPU Memory.

You see 3-3.5GB in XP-32, I seen 3.25GB as my GPU has 768MB of Memory, its no different for having a normal X-FI with 2MB of Memory or one with 64MB of Memory.

I have already stated above the Extreme Music is well suited to both Audio and Games, as it has 3 Modes.

The Gamer may have 3 modes as of software is same but its a cheaper put together card and if you like Audio you buy the better one (again Google it on the geek sites who mod the cards).

Its common sence, the Gamer is aimed at peeps who mainly Game and the Music is aimed at peeps who maily listen to audio, I do both and also movies so I bought the best model avail.

And there is dozens of threads alrady here with same Card A v Card B and 4GB RAM issues.

Even a blind man could see the lesser quality here:


SC-051-CL_400.jpg



xfiextremeclv0.jpg


BTW, there is no Heatsink on that as its from Creatives site and all Asian cards are better Silicon than ours so do not run as hot and need a Heatsink to stop the famous snap/crackle and pop they made. (Creative publicalyl admited this eventually).
 
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The gamer has the exact same 3 modes too... I don't quite understand what you mean by stating this because both suit both gaming and audio listening + creation audiences the same.
 
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