Sound Card Selection Advice Requested

[DWL]

I'd like to solicit advice from anyone concerning sound cards. I'm in the market to buy one for the following reason-- I may have a conflict with my current card.

This is the hardware I'm running (primarily on Windows 2000 Professional):

Celeron 550 (overclocked to 850@102)
Asus P3V4X
256MB RAM (high grade Mushkin)@ 133mhz
Diamond TNT2 (non-Ultra, usually not overclocked) AGP w/ 32MB
Sound Blaster Live! Value
3COM 10/100 Ethernet card
Pioneer DVD-105
HP CD-RW 8100+

The problem is that the SB Live! card. Apparently Creative doesn't like its products to share IRQs. This has caused untold grief on several computers I've configured or had to trouble-shoot on (highly frustrating system crashes for the most part). The Asus board, which is otherwise a very solid piece of hardware, doesn't allow one to disable ACPI (which is tied to the IRQ sharing). It does allow you to manually set the PCI slots' IRQ, but that apparently doesn't disable the ACPI so Windows 2000 overrides the settings and goes ahead and shares the IRQs anyway (Windows 2000 detects ACPI at install only so I've read, and I tried manually setting all the IRQs before installing but to no avail-- Win2k still shared the IRQs). Since I can't seem to find a way to disable ACPI via the motherboard, and I can't seem to find a way to resolve Creative's insistence on not sharing IRQs, I'm looking for a new sound card. One that is still a top-notch purveyor of sound, but one that is also more "friendly" with the OS and the surrounding hardware.

So, since I run Windows 2000 frequently (for a variety of reasons that make it difficult relinquish its status as my primary OS) and my motherboard is not capable of disabling ACPI, it looks like I'm stuck with changing my sound card. Apropos of this need, can anyone suggest a good sound card that won't break the bank while remaining IRQ-friendly? Thanks in advance.

- DWL

PS - If someone has a suggestion or solution to my actual problem, that would of course be preferable. =)

 

[gnognugs]

just curious, i got SB live to work on mine

 

[RockEater]

I've had problems in the past too with SBLive and IRQ, I think that the reason for the problem is backwards compatibility. That is, in order for the card to work easilly with old software(very old, like MS-DOS games), the card likes to grab certain system resources that used to be default sound blaster settings, like IRQs and memory address or somthing- I don't really know, but I do know that I have had trouble especially with SB16 emulation.

I was always able to solve the problem by moving the card to a different slot, or changing the order of the cards, or even removing all cards, getting SBLive! installed first, then adding everything else(many cards sometimes will auto configure to other resources if the default ones are already used)

Moving the card to a different slot even was once enough to make the difference between the card not being recognized, and everything working perfectly.

I would try to get the card working without any other devices installed(except for what is necessary(graphics)), and if it still doesn't work, time for a different one.

If you feel like reading some reviews, I reccomend 3dsoundsurge.com

Good luck!

 

[gnognugs]

RockEater No, but sometimes you do need to move cards.

I had IRQ problems once also on this board.
I disabled the COM ports, as I am not using them, and e'thang is AOK
Your busmastering is probably trying to share two cards that don't like to share.
This is happening because there are a limited number of available IRQs and COM ports
may be enabled by default in the BIOS.
If you do need to move cards, check the sharing order in the manual. There is a table.
Don't put a card in the slot that's shared by whatever slot the soundcard is in.

PS let the system go back to assigning IRQs

If you need further help PM me and I'll give my exact layout, since our systems are very similar.
I do dual boot too, so it is not win2k.

 

[DWL]

Thanks for the response. On my system, I made sure not to have the sound card in a slot where it would be sharing resources as outlined in the motherboard manual. Slots 3/6 and 4/5 are shared respectively on many boards. My sound card is in 3 with nothing in 6. However, my ethernet card in slot 4 shares resources with a modem (almost never in use) in slot 5.

Removing the devices (physically or just through the Device Manager) hasn't solved this problem in Windows 2000, in my experience. It may have for some other problems related to device order, but for this particular problem, which I believe is the sound card, it hasn't.

As mentioned before, from the troubleshooting I've done it SEEMS like the problem is the sound card, but if you have any other possible suggestions (from looking at my hardware list above) about what it could be, please do tell.

Symptoms:
In the last install of Win2k I had, I would get system hangs. Usually in applications with sound and graphics (like full-screen games or multimedia). Outside of that, there was never a problem for a full year. (A new Microsoft IntelliEye mouse did start giving me problems though at the end of that year however. When connected to the PS/2 port, the mosue by itself would occasionally stop working. Then when I switched it to the USB port, it would cause similar but more severe problems.) Now that I've recently reformatted (once again, Win2k) I get BSODs. Errors include KMODE or KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED. These lead me to believe it's hardware, perhaps specifically the sound since there is a known issue with Creative cards and ACPI.

Thanks again for any help.

- DWL

 

[gnognugs]

What VIA mobo drivers are you using? btw

 

[Tominator]

What do you have in BIOS for "Plug and Play OS installed?" Although the obvious setting is "Yes," it causes lots of IRQ and resource problems in some systems. I always leave it at "No."

 

[DWL]

I'm using the latest 4-in-1 and AGP drivers from the ASUS website. And the BIOS setting for Plug and Play is set to no. Any ideas what may be going on?

 

[divinemartyr]

Get yourself an Aopen AW744Pro with the Yamaha chipset in it. I have mine running in win2k with no issues whatsoever. It's got an optical out as well, if you care to send your sound to an A/V receiver and sounds amazing. I've yet to hear any SB product sound this good. You can purchase it pretty inexpensively here.


dm

 

[MGMorden]

The Ensoniq AudioPCI isn't bad for a cheap card either. It's a little dated but this is the most compatible trouble free card I ever saw. I really wish I wouldn't have sold mine.

 

[dcdomain]

I scanned through the other posts, but have you tried disabling ACPI, not on the BIOS level (since you said that can't happen) but on the OS level? I have mine currently disabled for an unrelated reason, but the way to do is is when doing a fresh install, hit F5 on the first blue screen when it asks you to hit F6 to install a third party driver etc...

If you don't want to do a fresh install, you can turn your computer from an ACPI computer into a normal computer following Pennstate's post (second one down) here: http://www.avsforum.com/ubb/Forum12/HTML/007674.html

 

[DWL]

dcdomain -

Thank you very much for that information. I followed it and have successfully disabled/removed ACPI from my Windows 2000 configuration. So far, it's alleviated one consistent crashing problem. Time will tell if it's solved the other issues, but I'm hoping for the best... I may not need to buy another sound card now until I want to expand (without ACPI I'm running on almost max IRQs). Thanks again!

- DWL

 

[littleprince]

have any of you ever tried going to the bios and setting irq 5 for an isa device that isn't PnP compatable?
just wondering...
coz, well, you know, thats what asus says to do....

 

[dcdomain]

Forgot to answer your original question... if you need a new sound card, the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz is AWESOME! And the SoundBlaster Live! 2 is on the horizon...

 

[gnognugs]

I'm running virtually the same hardware as you are plus IDE RAID card (I don't think hard drives, CDs, or video cards are going to make any difference in this case). I'm running win2k and win98se with ACPI enabled. I have had no problems, so I'm concerned that disabling ACPI is not your real problem. I guess we'll have to wait. Hope everything turns out well

BTW P&P OS should be set to YES unless you are not running windows.

 

[DWL]

gnognugs -

You were right. My problems still persisted. Quite frustrating. (Hope you guys are still following this thread.) I still had other crashing issues (multimedia intensive applications would not infrequently crash, leaving the screen locked and the sound card going on infinite loop). When I tried to make changes to fix these problems, I inadvertently changed back to ACPI. This brought back some of the old problems that had gone away when I undid ACPI. Unfortunately, this time when I undid ACPI again, those problems decided to stay. Namely, I have one highly reproducible problem where QuickTime will crash when I try to click on its menu bar. It will always crash immediately and give me a BSOD (KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED).

Anyone have any ideas what can be done from here? This is quite frustrating, especially since I can usually trouble-shoot my way out of things. Thanks again for any help.

- DWL

PS - gnognugs, I thought I had read somewhere to disable Plug 'n Play. It maybe have been apropos of ACPI though. Anyone know the rules on this?