Is the cdrom to soundcard cable conected?Couse in my case it was picking up all kinds of static from inside the case.

Nahkri wrote:

Is the cdrom to soundcard cable conected?Couse in my case it was picking up all kinds of static from inside the case.

I tried it both with the cable connected , and then taken out of the case altogether, no difference.

I should also add that Im using the latest BIOS , and the latest VIA 4in1 drivers, although I can't imagine that having anything to do with it.

Also , Im using an AGP X1950 Pro , 2X512MB Corsair XMS Platinum DDR (soon to be 4X512MB once I get the other 2 sticks), 2 IDE Hard drives.

thing is, all of those parts were used in my Athlon XP machine, in the same case, and there were no issues, which leads me to suspect its either a motherboard hardware issue , or software.

Can you try another sound card? Newer Creative would be ideal, but anything else would work too. Sorry if that's too much grasping at straws already, I'm at a loss too.

Does the issue only occur in games, i.e. it's fine in Windows on the first boot?

sadly I don't have any other card that would work with XP, I have 2 other cards, one is an ISA SB16 clone, and another is a PCIE X-FI TItanium (used in my modern machine) , neither would be compatible as the a8v has no PCIE or ISA of course.

one weird thing Ive noticed while testing things is that , when I first turn on the PC, with the sound being messed up , running the Doom3 timedemo gives me a result of 52, after restarting and with the sound working fine, the same techdemo gives me 59 , and its a consistent result too.

might have something to do with it?

I am thinking of getting a PCI based X-FI if I can get one for cheap (there are alot of cheap Xtreme Audio versions, which lack EAX as far as I know, so useless for me), to see if it solves the issue. But obviously I would rather stick with the Audigy

edlt: yes it seems to only happen in games.

Try xp with sp3 and latest drivers for the zs, i also have a socket 939 athlon 64, but with nvidia chipset and audigy 2 zs but using xp with sp3 and i have no issues.

Seconding updating the system.

You could try the onboard sound, just to check.

Nahkri wrote:

Try xp with sp3 and latest drivers for the zs, i also have a socket 939 athlon 64, but with nvidia chipset and audigy 2 zs but using xp with sp3 and i have no issues.

hmm, might try that , though I'm not sure how much of a burden it might be on the system to have SP3 installed (its a single core 3800+ , so kind of midrange for the Athlon64s)

what I will do is update to SP3 first (apparently there is an extra fix for AMD CPUs that had to be applied first) , and see how it runs and whether the problem gets fixed.
if it doesn't fix it, I will connect the onboard audio when I get the extra 1GB of RAM . kind of a pain to drag this case out of the desk compartment (its a cooler master wave, so a bit hefty)

EDIT : Sadly switching to SP3 didn't solve the issue, thankfully I backed up SP2 so I can revert back to it, SP3 isn't bad , but it is a little slower

Darkman wrote:

hmm, might try that , though I'm not sure how much of a burden it might be on the system to have SP3 installed (its a single core 3800+ , so kind of midrange for the Athlon64s)

This comes up more often than it should, but the simple answer is "no burden whatsoever" unless you only have 64-128MB of RAM. For an Athlon64 it shouldn't even be a discussion (benchmark data have shown over the years the measured differences in a variety of applications is often less than 1% (that's usually smaller than the margin error for a given benchmark suite)).

what I will do is update to SP3 first (apparently there is an extra fix for AMD CPUs that had to be applied first) , and see how it runs and whether the problem gets fixed.
if it doesn't fix it, I will connect the onboard audio when I get the extra 1GB of RAM . kind of a pain to drag this case out of the desk compartment (its a cooler master wave, so a bit hefty)

EDIT : Sadly switching to SP3 didn't solve the issue, thankfully I backed up SP2 so I can revert back to it, SP3 isn't bad , but it is a little slower

As far as AMD fixes, the only one I'm aware of for XP applies to dual-core processors (so your Athlon64 wouldn't be affected).

The only thing I thought of in response to the problem is heat - if the Audigy is overheating you can get a static/crackle sound, however rebooting seems to clear the issue so that's confusing. If you have a cheapo heatsink you can stick on the Audigy's main chip that should eliminate heat as a problem (worked for my 2 ZS Platinum years ago). Alternately if you can test with a fan just blowing straight at the Audigy.

Something else that I thought of - can you try with another graphics card? Ideally one that's native AGP (GeForce 6800, GeForce FX, Radeon 9, etc). Where I'm going with this: the X1950 is a bridged card, and an imperfect one at that. I've known some PCIe bridge/multiplier/etc features on cards to cause issues with systems in the past (e.g. GeForce 7950GX2's HSI bridge), so it isn't unreasonable (imho) to test out if there's an issue with the X1950 and this specific configuration.

Random generic troubleshooting ideas:

- Try moving the Audigy to a different PCI slot
- Try running memtest
- If you've only tested the issue to exist in Doom 3, try different games, try re-installing Doom 3
- Make sure NB/SB isn't overheating
- Try a different PSU

The X1950 Pro is one of the better bridged cards I've used. It's been trouble-free in PIII, P4, and A64 systems--even the VIA based ones. I can't say the same thing about NV-based bridged cards, which seem to dislike VIA boards, as well as the newer Radeon HD AGP cards, which seem to dislike all boards. 🤣

Darkman wrote:

I am thinking of getting a PCI based X-FI if I can get one for cheap (there are alot of cheap Xtreme Audio versions, which lack EAX as far as I know, so useless for me), to see if it solves the issue. But obviously I would rather stick with the Audigy

In my experience X-Fi works very well with VIA chipsets. I use an Extreme Music (a Real X-Fi) in a VIA 694 based system and haven't heard any crackling/static from it. Audigy and Live! cards also work reasonably well in that system, but they occasionally stutter when CPU load is high.