O.K. I see some posts about having some having no sound in Vista, others
about the lousy driver Creative (your surprised?) puts out...my question is
does anyone make a sound card that is Vista compatible without make shift
crippled drivers. From a company that actually did their homework and got
it right?
Given that the problem seems to be more than just with Creative, I
submit that the problem is with Vista. Along that line I'm pasting a
note that I've been passing around in trying to find some answers.
I have two issues after a completely fresh reinstallation of Vista x64
so far that I really haven't been able to resolve. I have a fairly
decent system which I built myself with the following specifications :
AMD64 x2 4600+ processor
4GB Super Talent DDR-II 800 memory
Gigabyte GA-MA770-S3 motherboard
ATI 3870 Radeon video card
The motherboard has a RealTek 888 audio chip which is pretty good as
far as I can tell. I've also tried the Creative PCIE X-Fi Extreme
Audio (a Audigy 2 under the hood I'm told). Both devices have the
latest drivers available for them and the motherboard has the latest
BIOS revision available.
1) Vista is indicating a high amount of CPU utilization when playing
any audio. Foobar 2000 is using about 15~25% over the 2~10% that Vista
alone uses. WinAmp uses a little more generally speaking though this
could be due to the somewhat active graphics in that applications. Of
course Windows Media Player is just plumb pathetic using about 50%
more than WinAmp and frequently pings one of the cores over 75%
utilization while maintaining the secondary core above 35% on average.
2) Another problem I've had is getting 5.1 sound for my Logitech
Z5500's from either sound card via the SPDIF optical cable. It simply
won't work. I get 2 channels and that's it. And that's from both
cards.
Note that I'm not entirely incapable when it comes to computers and
I've optimized many Win95 ~ WinXP systems for end users. I've also
made a couple of tweaks to drop the CPU usage down slightly on this
system as well. Still, there is some reason for this high usage that I
simply can't figure out. Any recommendations short iof rolling back to
XP are most welcome.
P.S. I forgot to mention that the audio files are .wav's ripped
directly from CD's and stored on an internal hard drive though I found
no difference when I tried MP3's as well. Also there is no antivirus
installed as I don't bother with such things.
John