Hercules Game Theater XP

[JLP]

Yup I know about the busmaster problem. And I think it's both VIA and CL who are to blame for the situation. That's why I decided to buy new soundcard. And I think DTXP is not a busmaster hog like Live! is (at least with current drivers and current situation with VIA chipsets)
Anyway thanks for help.

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Live long and prosper!

[XHotKolaX]

I'm a user of GTXP. With the new drivers everything is spiffy. About time soundcards started moving forward.

[Victorian]

FYI,new patch for via boards which is supposed to help with the Live (link at end):

George has released a new patch to address the PCI problems on VIA chipsets with the 686b south bridge. The most noticeable fixes are to the large file transfers and problems associated with the SB Live! This new version brings us up to 1.4 and if you have any of the following problems, I suggest you try this out:

Files copied from one IDE hard disk drive to another are corrupted

The computer stops ("freezes", "hangs", "locks up") when playing sounds, especially to a Creative SoundBlaster LIVE! card
The computer stops ("freezes", "hangs", "locks up"), or files are corrupted, when copying to or from an IDE DVD, CDROM, or CDRW drive

Sounds from a SoundBlaster LIVE! card are distorted when other PCI settings are adjusted in the computer

http://viahardware.com/

Scroll down page for link to patch.

[Gurm]

Well, the problems with the Live! aren't relegated solely to the VIA.

The point in fact is that NONE of the "last-gen" sound cards, which include the Live!, seem to handle Win2k particularly well. I had an interesting discussion with one of the engineers at Hercules (who shall of course remain nameless) about some of the intrinsic problems with last-gen hardware. He actually feels for the driver folks at Creative.

But the problems appear in ALL SMP chipsets, not just VIA. And the same problems can be found to one extent or another with the 810, 815, 820, 840, 850 from Intel as well.

Truthfully, if you have BX chipset you're all set.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Liquid Snake]

Hmm. Well, I have an SBLive! working under Win2K. Yes, I have a BX board (Abit BE6-II). The only problems I've ever had with this card is that I get occasional clicks and skips in the sound. Not often enough to be a problem though. I do have Live!Ware installed. I was expecting a lot of problems based on what I had heard, but the SBLive! has actually been problem-free, excluding the clicks in the sound. My only complaint about this card is no (and probably never) support for A3D 2.0. EAX is horrible compared to A3D 2.0. It's basically just 3D sound with fancy reverb effects tossed in.

[This message has been edited by Liquid Snake (edited 22 April 2001).]

[Guyver]

Very interesting thread to me...

As my ME box took a dump, I've transfered my gaming to my 2K rig temporarily. It has the VIA 694X chipset in the ASUS CUV4X-D variety.

Within a very simple game, Diablo II, the sound gets all garbled, and very scratchy, whiny, trashy... Then clears up for a bit, then goes again...

I feel for anyone taken in by VIA, including myself (as they are the relatively least expensive dual PIII-chipset makers out there), and I hope they get it resolved.

BTW - The new Creative SBLIVE! 5.1 drivers for Windows 2K, have greatly reduced the garbage sound effects in Diablo II. They are still there from time to time, but I'd say about 85-90% reduced from their previous levels....

I believe this issue is also responsible for problems with my HP 8200i CDRW and burning CDs... (It finishes the burn, and verify, then the program hangs. - At least the CDs are good and not coasters... )

These problems are also why I've decided to hold off on getting the ASUS A7M266 motherboard and T-Bird 266 combo I was looking at to replace the BX133-RAID. I went ahead and ordered another BX133-RAID, and some additional cooling supplies. (As well as told the Fiance to leave the AC on 24x7)

Guyver

[This message has been edited by Guyver (edited 22 April 2001).]

[Gurm]

The problems with VIA, believe it or not, get exponentially worse when you are using an Athlon chip. And this _isn't_ a hack on AMD, since I REALLY like their chip design (and pricing!) but at this point I can't build:

1. An SMP Athlon system.
2. A stable Athlon system.

(The caveat is that if I were willing to trade in my memory, power supply, and probably all my cabling, I could likely get #2 working. Mostly.)

The new SBLive! drivers _do_ fix a lot of things. The problem is that they are really being bad about communicating with their customers... they've announced that there will NOT be a Live!ware 4, and with the release of the Audigy looming nearer we may never see any better SB Live! drivers.

As for your issues, Guyver - ANY clicking hissing or popping is unacceptable, IMHO.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Guyver]

That would explain why I finally got off me bum and ordered the replacement mobo.

I have to admit, I hadn't kept up on Creative's new product development. Any place to read up on the "Audigy" thingy? (thingy being a technical term )

I really dislike playing Diablo II under my 2k box. I normally reserve it for business applications, and dialing into work for on-call issues, and of course G@H!

Thanks Gurm,

Guyver

[Liquid Snake]

Hmm, Creative's drivers page says the Live! 5.1 drivers are just standalone packages of the ones that come from the CD, so I assume they don't have any changes?

[Wombat]

It's been mentioned in this thread already, but you guys with Via chipset's and Live's need to either get your new BIOS, or try the driver from George Breese. It fixed my problems, and I can burn CD's again. And my system didn't just hang, it would reboot.

[Gurm]

Or get a non-retrograde card?

Really, the issue is that the SB Live! (as well as ALL the other last-gen cards such as all the ones based on the Yamaha chipsets, and even the aureal cards) just has ISSUES with Windows 2000's way of handling hardware. It has issues with ACPI, it has issues with hardware polling, and it has issues with following PCI spec and sharing the bus.

It's not alone. Many last-gen PCI cards didn't share IRQ's. I can't count how many cards have a little "this card needs its own IRQ" disclaimer on them. And we're not talking realtime capture or rendering cards, we're talking modems and NICs and hard drive controllers and sound cards.

That's just the way it is. All the last-gen cards are like that.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Duty]

Hello all,

Its strange, I've read a lot of posts on this forum for about the problems with Live! and Vortex based cards. And I wonder, why is it I have not had this type of problem. I've set up both types of cards on both via and intel based motherboards. My only thought is the process in which I set up computers.
So, when setting up a new computer at what point do you add the sound card? When do you add the motherboard dirvers and such?
This might have an effect that has been over looked around here.

Current home comp has MX300 in Win2k on default drivers. Have not had a problem yet.
Home comp has a Abit board (BP6).
I set up (or helped) 4 Athlon systems in the last 2 months, all with SB Live! in win2k. Most of my friends only use win2k now.
Either Abit or Asus motherboards. Both SD and DDR ram.

Just a thought...

Jeff


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Remember when naps were a bad thing?

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You stop learning when you are die, and some people just don't know the're dead yet!
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ABIT BP6 - 2 x Celeron 500 - 512MB PC133 Ram - MX300 - 3Com 509c - Creative PC DVD 6x - GeForce2 MX(for now) - DSL (True Love Here) - Win98 se - Win 2000 pro

[Gurm]

Default drivers work just fine. It's the better drivers that suck. If you don't need/want 3D sound, there's no problem.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Indiana]

The SB Undead! at least with the current drivers is a major PCI bus-hog. It constantly transfers null-bytes even when there's no sound played at all, taking up to 30% of PCI bandwidth. This is said to be cured by disabling MIDI, but unfortunately you cannot disable just the MIDI functions in Win2k like it is possible in Win98, if you do the whole card is disabled - another driver flaw. This unnecessary (a soundcard definitely doesn't need much data transferred over the bus) bus-hogging leads to various problems with other PCI-bandwidth consuming devices (SCSI, RAID,...) on a lot of systems, including some Intel ones - this is just aggraved by VIAs busmastering problems but not solely caused.
Besides if you want to continue to rant over the Live! you can find various other things: extremely long latency drivers (far from realtime-capable), only mediocre sound-quality (no 24/32Bit support, average SNR,...).

That said I have no major problems with the SB Live! in my rig even though I have a VIA-based board (ABit KT7 RAID) and I'm using all three: a UW-SCSI PCI-card, the HighPoint RAID and Win2k. And since I'm capturing video to the RAID there definitely is a lot PCI-bandwidth consumed. No clicks/sound stutters here.
So you might want to try a bit more getting the SBLive! working as it [b]is[/) possible.
First set PCI Delay transaction to disabled in the BIOS, then install the PCI latency patch. Running Win2k in non-ACPI mode might help as well as changing the PCI-slot the Live resides (slot3 is said to be the best.

And beware: Most other soundcards have other flaws as well, especially in Win2k and the few ones that are very high quality (MontegoII) and are working well are more studio cards and not meant for gaming, lacking support for A3D, EAX,...
So be carefull before you spend money on a different card only to make the situation even worse: since the SBLive! is such a common product, developers are forced to work-around it's bugs, this is not the case with other more exotic models.

Edit: P.S. it's also better for most people if they have only the LiveWare drivers installed and not the full bloatware-package...

[This message has been edited by Indiana (edited 22 April 2001).]

[EvilDonnyboy]

But if you dont want 3D sound, why would u be using a card like that? Chances are, if u bought a good 3D sound card, you'd want goo 3D sound.