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Best PCI sound card for S939 nForce4 motherboard with buggy PCI bus?

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First post, by Gamerappa

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I currently have a Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme (which I'm aware isn't a true X-Fi card and is rather a rebadged Audigy SE) installed on my S939 computer. However, I'm having a problem where the sound immediately drops after the startup sound on XP. No crackling as far as I'm aware, but I need to reinitialize the driver multiple times through Device Manager. The issue is that the sound card seems to forget that there's an audio cable plugged in? I am using the Daniel_K "P17X Series Support Pack 3.1" drivers from 2015, since his other packs don't support this card, and the official ones apparently crash Windows during installation.

As the problem could be related to the PCI bus, I've tried to change the PCI latency using both PCI Latency Tool 3.1 v2 and the BIOS settings, and that doesn't seem to fix it. I'm convinced that this sound card is straight up incompatible with this motherboard.

The motherboard is a Tyan Tomcat K8E S2865G2NR, it does not have onboard audio compared to the S2865AG2NRF. It only has one PCI-E slot, which is being used by my Radeon X1800 XT, so unfortunately I cannot use PCI-E sound cards.

Reply 1 of 4, by zuldan

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Gamerappa wrote on 2026-04-27, 19:28:

It only has one PCI-E slot, which is being used by my Radeon X1800 XT, so unfortunately I cannot use PCI-E sound cards.

All reviews say this board has 1x (PCI-E x16) port and 2x (PCI-E x1) ports. I think change your sound card to a PCI-E one.

Reply 2 of 4, by Gamerappa

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I stand corrected. Turns out there are indeed two PCI-E X1 ports. I'll most likely get a Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium.

Reply 3 of 4, by swaaye

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I've used Audigy 2 and XFi 64MB edition on PCI on NF4 without much issue. Ti PCIe works too. I usually use Daniel K drivers.

Some GPUs can cause audio problems. Some put off a ton of EMI and it adds a whine to the sound card. This is why internal sound cards are problematic. Some GPU drivers do evil things with bus latency that cause crackle and pop.

Reply 4 of 4, by Gamerappa

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I did actually manage to find a workaround to this issue by installing an old version of Steam (using stmsrvemu). No clue if it's because of Steam, but ever since I installed it all of my audio issues have since magically disappeared and I have no more issues with the driver. Might look into upgrading the sound card anyways but at least I can wait a bit longer.

Another issue I forgot to wrote in my initial post is that the volume of each consecutive sound became less and less louder, and it seemed like the driver would "go out" every time an application opened, as opposed to the "crackling".

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