Legit Reviews

I have recently installed the following games:
1.F.E.A.R
2.Unreal tournament 3
3.Guild wars eye of the north

My sound was working great, but now when i load up the games it crackles and distorts. Is this a driver or hardware issue. The sound works fine when playing a simple audio file.

I dont have any clues as to what is the problem, all I know is that crackling cant be good for my speakers. Any ideas would be great.

Actually it still crackles when playing an audio file just alot less than when in a game.

try turning it down (both on the speakers and in windows). if that doesnt help what kind of speakers/sound card are yo using? and make sure you have the latest drivers installed

Are you running some flavor of X-Fi sound card?

I have the following hardware installed:
1.Motherboard: M3A32-MVP Deluxe
2.Graphics card: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB GDDR5 TV-Out/Dual DVI/HDMI
3.Sound card: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer 7.1 Sound Card (30SB073000002)
4.Ram: Crucial Ballistix Tracer RED 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-6400C4 800MHz Dual Channel Kit (BL2KIT25664AR804)
5.Hard Drive: Western Digital VelociRaptor 74GB 10000RPM SATA-II 16MB Cache
6.Power supply: 1000w power supply
7.Razer Mako THX Certified 2.1 Speaker System
8.Processor: AMD Phenom X4 Quad Core 9950 2.60GHz Black Edition (Socket AM2)

All my hardware is brand new, also I am having trouble playing F.E.A.R on high res even on med res it still laggs. I bought this stuff because I thought it was the best, shouldnt it be able to handle F.E.A.R no problems at all?

ive heard a lot about xfi having problems with vista, this seems to be what cannyone is getting at aswell

I tried vista but it is to uncompatible so im now on XP. could it be a faulty sound card or that the card cannot cope with the high quality sound the games porduce?

does it still happen on XP?

Yeh i switched sound cards and speakers and im on XP and the sound is still distorted lagged and not there. it crackles and everything. it cant be my speakers.

its just got weirder, i can now here my mouse wheel scrolling up and down on the page. It sorta creeks. But when i have my headphones off i cant here the mouse wheel at all. Its like some sorta elctrical disturbance. this is getting weirder all the time. could i have a stacticed board??

its only when i have a page that will scroll up and down. when i just move the mouse wheel on the desktop i hear nothing at all.

sorry for all these posts.

I just remeberd that about a week ago my graphics card played up badly. Lines were going vertically down the screen and there was a pink tint to the screen. I turned my computer on and off again and the problem seemed to go away. But could watever cased the graphics card problem be casuing my speaker problem?

Please use the edit button in the future

the graphics card sounds like over heating. are you sure you have the latest driveres installed?

My graphics card never goes over 50deg clesius. It cant have overheated.

but do you monitor it when playing games for extended periods of time?

I can check it every now and then and it is stable AT 50. I have increased the fan speed so the big fat heat sinc on there dose its job, there is no chance it would overheat. I had the problem with my graphicss card when i restarted my computer, it just loaded up with the lines and the pink colour. It was strange at first, but I thought it was cause i flashed my bios. I tried re flashing and installing other drivers, but in the end strangley it just went back to working fine on its own. Kinda like a merical.

I have the same sound card and have similar crackling while playing BF2142 - last i check there is not a fix for it. check out the forums on creative website for some more information. mine gets so bad it sometimes would crash my computer. it would only crackle when X-fi was enabled.

might want to try this thread: http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=465221

when you say turn off x-fi do you mean the crystalizer and the cmss?
also someone says it is the graphics card eating up all the pci bandwidth. Can this happen, is the sound card and graphics card somehow connected?