Try DanielK's Audigy driver pack.

The latest version installs fine on WinXP + SP3.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-03-09, 22:01:

Try DanielK's Audigy driver pack.

The latest version installs fine on WinXP + SP3.

Just tried his Audigy Support Pack 8.1.

I uninstalled all the previous drivers/software, then installed his drivers.

While the drivers installed fine, it didn't fix the issue. I'm getting the exact same noise problem as before.

Update:

I set up a test bench using a Pentium 4 3GHz and an Intel D875PBZ motherboard. Did a clean install of Windows XP SP3 and then installed the Audigy 2 ZS.

I tried both the DanielK Audigy Support Pack 8.1 and the Audigy 2 ZS install CD. Both drivers worked and there was no audible noise whatsoever using EAX or CMSS 2. Even cranking the volume to maximum, the card was blissfully silent. So it appears the card itself is fine.

I did run into a problem with the DanielK pack, however. It caused Windows XP to not shut down properly; it would just hang. Uninstalling everything fixed the issue.

Afterwards, I re-installed the Audigy into the Asus P4S533-E setup. As expected, the noise was still there.

I tried further experiments swapping out the processor, RAM, GPU, even removing floppy, DVD-ROM, and CF card connections. Also tried disabling every extraneous hardware device in the BIOS. None of this made a difference.

For my next step, I think I'll try removing the motherboard and setting it up standalone with a different PSU, and do a completely clean Windows XP setup. If the noise still persists then it may just be a weird hardware incompatibility between these devices.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-03-11, 00:26:

I did run into a problem with the DanielK pack, however. It caused Windows XP to not shut down properly; it would just hang.

I've been using DanielK's Audigy drivers on all of my retro rigs which run WinXP and have an Audigy card installed. So far, I've never encountered that shutdown issue.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-03-11, 06:29:

I've been using DanielK's Audigy drivers on all of my retro rigs which run WinXP and have an Audigy card installed. So far, I've never encountered that shutdown issue.

Yeah, I'm not sure what the cause was.

FWIW, I did a full install of that pack on my test bench. Whereas on my multi-boot rig, I selectively installed only some of the components/programs.

I suspect one of the additional programs I installed with the full install may have been the cause. However, I didn't bother taking the time to troubleshoot this since my main concern was diagnosing the noise issue.

Took everything apart and tried with a completely different PSU. I even tried not connecting the 4-pin molex connector (aux power) the motherboard has to see if that would make a difference. Board boots fine, but the noise is still there.

Did some further experiments with various PCI settings (latency, etc.), other BIOS settings, disabling DMA on the drives... At this point I'm just shooting in the dark. Nothing has fixed the issue.

It seems like this board is somehow incompatible with the Audigy 2 ZS with EAX reverb. Which seems like an oddly specific incompatibility.

Short of just using a different motherboard, I don't know what else to try.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-03-11, 22:57:

It seems like this board is somehow incompatible with the Audigy 2 ZS with EAX reverb. Which seems like an oddly specific incompatibility.

Short of just using a different motherboard, I don't know what else to try.

Hopefully digging up a 7 month old thread isn't problematic, but I too have issues with my few ZS boards in a machine here.

Your board is based on an SiS chipset so says TRW, I'm betting it has something to do with the way SiS is trying to talk to the card, albeit "by the book" or probably not whereas the Audigy is doing it in some other way that the chipset doesn't like, but not to the extent the machine crashes.

In my case, I'm having issues with them in a Dell with an Intel 850 chipset (OptiPlex GX400) where, one minute everything is perfectly fine, card is usable normally with whatever drivers, but if I open a game and turn on EAX at all, for whatever purpose, at some point the machine will start having sound glitches and worst case, lock up completely with glitched sound playing before it can get to a blue screen state. This is especially issue-prone if I open a game that has EAX on by default and you don't know it... GTA:SA comes to mind for instance. No easy way to turn it off there without editing a config file if memory serves.

My remedy to this problem was to just swap to another card, and I had to drop in a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, which would have been the card that would have come with the board had it been a Dimension 8100 instead (given the same motherboard with varying feature sets exists in the Dimension 8100, OptiPlex GX400 and the Precision 330)... This is fine, and I get the added benefit of a wavetable header, but certainly not ideal as I wanted the FireWire input as well.

I'm currently trying to get my hands on more sound blaster cards from the era (i.e. X-Fi, E-MU variants, software-only Audigy cards, Live 24-bit so I can do some more in-depth tests, and have already confirmed this happens with the other GX400 board I have, meaning the problem I face almost positively exists for this entire line of machines.

Live! Cards seem to work fine-ish if you have older drivers, but with the Audigy it doesn't matter what drivers you use, they're all buggy and flaky. Compared to when shoved in a more modern machine, where the issues explained do not exist.

On my end what I've done aside from testing multiple drivers and even fresh OS installs is to go the next mile through and re-cap all my Audigy 2 ZS cards with the recommended upgrade of 47-100uF capacitors on the input and output side of the voltage regulators on the bottom-right of the board. For some reason this alone is enough to fix issues for some individuals but not in my case. I've also recapped the motherboard and replaced the power supply to no avail.

There already seems to be a thread where someone has had issues with VIA chipsets and that much is rather documented, but I've found little to no information regarding problems with older Intel chipsets in the late P3/early P4 era with regards to sound card incompatibility... There's errata that was fixed in the Intel 850E for instance that may or may not mean better compatibility with these cards, but I need to double-check the docs on that.