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First post, by bZbZbZ

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Hi everyone, I'm having trouble with a sound drivers and would be grateful for any insight you may have.

I bought a used Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium (Fatal1ty), for use in a high powered Windows XP gaming rig. This is the PCI Express x1 card, model SB0880. When I remove the metal shield, the card looks just like this one:
https://i.redd.it/k24cc4013hk11.jpg

This is supposed to be an upgrade for my prior "software" based sound cards, both of which worked just fine (X-Fi Xtreme Audio PCIe, Audigy SE PCI).

The issue is that when I get most of the way through the driver install, I get hit with a Blue Screen of Death & immediate reboot, followed by a BSOD/reboot before Windows XP login, etc. I can get into safe mode but I'm not sure what to look for there. Since Windows XP's System Restore is sort of terrible, at this point I re-image my C drive from a backup and try again, but without success.

I've tried the following drivers:

They both yield the same BSOD bootloop. I have a suspicion that there is a conflict with an existing driver. My first guess was the HDMI audio driver for my Radeon... I tried disabling that driver in the Device Manager prior to installing and still got the same result.

Does anyone have any experience with this?

I don't think there is a hardware defect, because I when I install Linux Mint, whatever driver the OS selects installs without issue and the sound is excellent.

System specs:
Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ stock
Asus P5E-VM-HDMI with sound & video disabled in BIOS
4 GB DDR2 RAM
Radeon 6850 1GB (official AMD Catalyst 14.4 driver)
Dell U2007WFP LCD monitor (1600x1200 via DVI)
Intel SSD320 160GB
Windows XP SP3 (x86) & Linux Mint 13.2 Cinnamon (x64)

Reply 1 of 9, by Joseph_Joestar

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Try DanielK's X-Fi driver pack. I use his drivers for my X-Fi and Audigy2 ZS cards under WinXP and Win7 and I've never had any issues.

If that doesn't help, it could be that some remnants of your old drivers are causing the problem, so it might be a good idea to do a clean WinXP install.

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 2 of 9, by bZbZbZ

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Thanks for the tip. Yeah I figured a clean install would be the nuclear option. I'll give that a go.

Do you know of any specific improvements in Daniel_K drivers over official? I went to his website and read the material... from what I can tell it's mostly a repackaging of Creative assets where it detects your specific sound card SKU and installs the appropriate software. Is there anything lower level that's been changed?

Reply 3 of 9, by Joseph_Joestar

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bZbZbZ wrote on 2020-05-25, 23:56:

Do you know of any specific improvements in Daniel_K drivers over official? I went to his website and read the material... from what I can tell it's mostly a repackaging of Creative assets where it detects your specific sound card SKU and installs the appropriate software. Is there anything lower level that's been changed?

I don't know that they change anything, besides making it easier to install the proper drivers for the supported sound cards.

Other than that, I think Daniel's driver pack also strips out the bloatware that comes bundled with Creative's drivers (usually AOL crap).

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 4 of 9, by bZbZbZ

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Okay, I did a clean install of Windows XP, and the Daniel_K driver caused the exact same BSOD.

I'm guessing there's a conflict with something that's been slipstreamed into my XP SP3 installation media. 🙁

Reply 5 of 9, by darry

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I once had a defective X-FI (retail SB0460 in my case) that caused a BSOD every time I tried to install the driver in Windows 7 or 10 . I replaced with another identical retail card and it installed and worked fine (this was before the Windows 10 build 1903 driver X-FI issue, so not related to that).

Not saying that your issue is the same, just that it is a possible scenario .

If possible, I would try the card in another PC .

Reply 6 of 9, by cyclone3d

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I would guess a faulty card as well.

The official drivers for the PCI and PCIe cards are different driver packs if I remember correctly.

The card should just work with the drivers from Creative's site. I have a couple of those cards and never had any issues with them.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 7 of 9, by pii_legacy

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The X-FI cards and drivers are notoriously buggy. You may spend a while on Creative's site hunting down the drivers for your actual item. I've had to dig around a while before finding the right ones before for certain older cards. Creative installers will also frequently lock you out of installing drivers you need for no good reason, so that's probably a plus side for the driver pack.

Reply 8 of 9, by chrismeyer6

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Have you tried the card in a different system? I have to pci xfi fatality cards since new and I've never had any issues with them or the drivers from creatives site. Also make sure it's not some own card that needs special drivers like a Dell or hp custom card.

Reply 9 of 9, by bZbZbZ

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Hi everyone, thanks for the replies. Sorry for the late update.

I tried the card in a totally different semi-modern PC (Phenom II running Windows 10). Windows 10 picked up the card immediately, sound worked fine. If I manually install any official (Creative) or unofficial (DanielK) driver, I get the BSOD. Yes, even in Windows 10. I'm aware of the multitude of Live/Audigy boards but my understanding is that there is only one sku of X-Fi Fatal1ty.

My guess now is that Darry and Cyclone3D are right... something on the hardware isn't right. I've swapped back to the lower spec X-Fi Xtreme Audio PCIe and things are fine. Oh well...