Clean the slots and the edge connector on the card with electrical switch cleaner, or iso alcohol.

Try different slots, disable any unused legacy devices in the bios,parallel and serial ports, onboard audio etc. To free up resources.

Good luck!

Chances are the Audigy is the problem.

And no, your video card is not capable of melting the solder on a card even 1 slot away. If it was, then you would have much bigger problems.. such as fire or components falling off of your video card.. and the video card would definitely no longer be alive.

🤣

Solder's melting point is high enough that you would be smelling other things burning and melting first, like the PCI slot itself. Even plastics adjacent to things that must be soldered can only handle that kind of heat for a moment, and then they turn to goo. So that's definitely not it. 😀

I have had TWO Sound Blaster Audigy cards show up DOA from Ebay, right in a row. So far (knock on wood) that's two more failures than any other ISA / PCI / AGP card I've bought online. Third time was a charm, and it has been working well so far. Fourth time (a low-profile Audigy for a slim case) also worked out OK. Every SB, SBPro, SB16, AWE, Live, Audigy 2, and Dxr MPEG card has been fine, so my supposition -- with this absurdly low sample density -- is that the Audigy is more prone to failure than its siblings.

Agree it is probably the Audigy card. What exact motherboard are you using ?

chief wrote on 2020-01-17, 23:13:

The motherboard uses ULi 220 chipset drivers (nvidia). I have managed to install all drivers except for the one entitled AGP to PCI Controller which crashes the installer with a Kernel32 error.

That is an issue that could be related.

The Audigy is the only non graphics card that I've had fail in use. First Creative's drivers wouldn't recognize the card, but the generic drivers still worked. Fast forward a few years, totally dead. Don't know why. Felt gimmicky anyway.

the 22µF caps near the voltage regulation are known to go bad on audigy and pci x-fi cards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUcQkAmIv2g

hwh wrote on 2020-01-18, 10:08:

The Audigy is the only non graphics card that I've had fail in use. First Creative's drivers wouldn't recognize the card, but the generic drivers still worked. Fast forward a few years, totally dead. Don't know why. Felt gimmicky anyway.

My audigy 2 (nonZ), when using the cd installationfrom vogons drivers library, refused to be detected by the setup. Tried on win98 se and board with Zx chipset.
On xp worked fine.

Hi,
Thanks for the replies.

I knew I wouldn't be able to go out for any circuit cleaner/alcohol for cleaning, though I had tried blowing out any dust from the connectors. I did wonder if meths would work since I know it's used on cleaning cmos battery acid from motherboards and I do actually have some.

In the end I opted to finally clean the other PC I'd mentioned, and once it was eventually up and running with a new Ubuntu install I tested the Audigy and the two pci cards I discovered in the PC itself. The Audigy was the only one not to work, and even though unsupported by 9x, the bios of the PC that housed the Audigy originally found PCI devices (as did windows, but no drivers) successfully.

I hoped with the Audigy gone maybe that AGP/PCI controller device driver may finally install, but it was still a Kernel32 error - still, the AGP card and PCI slots must be working and Device manager shows no exclamation marks so I'll ignore this one I guess.

As to the solder, the heatsink of the gpu was very close to the Audigy, and I'd never seen any card before where the tips of solder were bent flat / over onto the pcb with one (at least) actually coming into contact with another pin on the card. As I didn't remember it being like this when I bought it (just over a year ago) I couldn't help but wonder if somehow the very tips had somehow got that hot, but a year's a long time to remember such things.

There weren't however the usual signs of burnt chips and the smell you get from them (last workplaces' computers - gotta love them), but I sort of didn't want to believe the card originally was manufactured like that.

The irony is that when I bought the card it was because I could never get the onboard audio (Uli M5455 chipset) detected by games under DOS, possibly due to a lack of drivers but I'm not sure as my DOS knowledge is somewhat lacking - I only have the windows drivers that nVidia supply for it. I figured since the Audigy had SB16 emulator drivers and in windows EAX support that it was a worthwhile purchase, only for its' own DOS drivers to fail to install so all my plans came to nought 😀

@hwh - Likewise the Audigy is the only card I've ever had fail since I started using Windows back in '99, except some RMA graphics cards that failed quickly after purchase.

Oh, and on fiddling with the screensaver options I kept getting Kernel32 errors and now I'm getting corrupt file warnings on boot so Windows can't load - see what I said about the amount of fun this has been?