It is a bad card the 0460 , I had so many issues making it work. I had to install the drivers 2 times. Dunno why , but for me as well , it would not work on a specific PCI slot , I had to move it to another , then worked.

Every time I installed the driver with software it failed to work. (no sound).

I had to install JUST the drivers first and after a reboot , I had to install the software separately.

In all fairness , it s not too much of a difference from the audigy 2 zs , I mean quality of sound wise...

Try cleaning the pins on the sound card with contact spray , reset bios , or check for IRQ conflicts in bios or windows.

Voodoo Rufus, I'm sad to hear that.
The sound becomes extremely quiet or disappears completely?
Have you tried testing other jack outputs in 5.1 mode?

If the sound disappears on main output (Line Out 1), then the problem may be with muting transistors, check this ***Update 01*** section: https://elakiri.com/threads/sound-blaster-x-f … modding.259442/

Also, if the X-Fi disappears from Device Manager or is not detected, there may be a problem with EMU20K1's power chain.

As far as I can tell with my headphones, the sound disappears completely. I have not tried 5.1 mode, just stereo/headphone.

I'll monkey with the drivers some more, even if I have to do an OS wipe and start from scratch. My Haswell is using a different ISO than the others, just in case that's an issue.

I got this card cheap enough I don't really care to return it, so maybe I'll hack those muting transistors. I'll clean the contacts first.

Obviously there's not a lot that used EAX5, but I still want to retain the capability if I can.

Voodoo Rufus wrote on 2025-11-06, 20:08:

As far as I can tell with my headphones, the sound disappears completely. I have not tried 5.1 mode, just stereo/headphone.

I'll monkey with the drivers some more, even if I have to do an OS wipe and start from scratch. My Haswell is using a different ISO than the others, just in case that's an issue.

While running WinXP with a PCI X-Fi card, I had more success when using this official driver CD than with DanielK's pack.

Of course, this won't help if there's an actual hardware problem with the card.

Thanks. I'll give that a shot, too. I don't know how much time DanielK spent on the XP side of it when the cards were mostly broken in Win7 and later.

Cleaned the pins and the slot. Uninstalled the driver and then the software. Reinstalled the card, and just the drivers from SnappyDriverInstaller, and did NOT install the software. Ran 3 timedemos of Halo before it quit again. SMH....

Voodoo Rufus wrote on 2025-11-06, 20:08:

As far as I can tell with my headphones, the sound disappears completely. I have not tried 5.1 mode, just stereo/headphone.

It's enough to plug headphones into other jack outputs (Line Out 2-3) to check whether the sound also disappears in 5.1 mode.
For this test I'm using foobar2000 with built-in 5.1 upmix plugin (via DSP Manager in foobar2000's Preferences).
I don't think that these transistors could break down at all outputs at once.

That is a weird issue indeed. I got myself an X-FI Fatal1ty Pro in June for my XP rig, also on a 775 Lanparty board (DK P45).
Most of the issues were either the Daniel K drivers and the speakers not working right (there was some contact inside the volume control that would cut sound out of one speaker). After that I installed drivers from an official Sound Blaster disc and everything worked. Except GTA San Andreas, that I discovered has cracks and pops in it's audio files, on every PC I tested it.

The card works fine, EAX works fine, and the front panel that came with the card comes in handy for plugging in headphones.

bitzu101 wrote on 2025-11-06, 14:25:

It is a bad card the 0460 , I had so many issues making it work. I had to install the drivers 2 times. Dunno why , but for me as […]
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It is a bad card the 0460 , I had so many issues making it work. I had to install the drivers 2 times. Dunno why , but for me as well , it would not work on a specific PCI slot , I had to move it to another , then worked.

Every time I installed the driver with software it failed to work. (no sound).

I had to install JUST the drivers first and after a reboot , I had to install the software separately.

In all fairness , it s not too much of a difference from the audigy 2 zs , I mean quality of sound wise...

Try cleaning the pins on the sound card with contact spray , reset bios , or check for IRQ conflicts in bios or windows.

I thought that SB0460 was the sound card to get for EAX on XP, especially the model with 64mb of ram.

Voodoo Rufus wrote on 2025-11-06, 20:08:

so maybe I'll hack those muting transistors.

As far as I remember, Audigy transistors can simply be removed.
In X-Fi, they are connected in series with the signal path, so they not only need to be removed, but the tracks also need to be connected with a jumper.
This was discussed on "audiophile" forums 15 years ago, and how-to guides are still available.

But usually, if hardware problems start with X-Fi, they always replace the capacitors near the DSP.
This is a typical problem with these sound cards - card not recognised by the system, sound interruptions, stuttering, etc.

That main cap near the DSP should be easy enough to replace. I took it off last night to try to test it but now having a hard time getting it back on. May as well use a new one anyway.

I'll try the OEM Creative driver package once the card is back together.

I did a bunch of reading on EAX last night. Most of the games that use EAX 4/5 I'd probably want to run on my Haswell XP machine, or maybe the AW9D build. For the older EAX games the Audigy 2 might be a better fit for the old Socket A machine anyway. And if I'm reading things right, using Alchemy I can get EAX 5 on any game that supports it as long as there's a Creative chip of some kind as the sound card, so that may be a valid avenue as well on the Win7 machine which has a Titanium HD or my Audigy Rx.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-11-06, 20:14:

Voodoo Rufus wrote on 2025-11-06, 20:08:

As far as I can tell with my headphones, the sound disappears completely. I have not tried 5.1 mode, just stereo/headphone.

I'll monkey with the drivers some more, even if I have to do an OS wipe and start from scratch. My Haswell is using a different ISO than the others, just in case that's an issue.

While running WinXP with a PCI X-Fi card, I had more success when using this official driver CD than with DanielK's pack.

Of course, this won't help if there's an actual hardware problem with the card.

I just bought one of these earlier today (SB0460) and was struggling with the drivers for a couple of hours until I found your post. Worked for me.