GA-EP45-DS4 Sound issue

[Noy]

Hello all,

I've tried searching the forums and haven't found the resolution to the problem I'm suffering from. So I apologise if there is a well known resolution on here.

Problem: On a cold boot I have no sound. Checking through the Device Manager my sound card is not listed. On a simple reboot, my sound card is listed in device manager and everything is OK. So everyday I have to boot up twice.

I'm on the F9 Bios.

Sound card: Creative X-Fi Titanium (PCI-e).
It's currently sat in the bottom slot (furthest from the CPU) and I can't move it to a different slot as the one above is blocked my Graphics card and the upper most slot is blocked by the motherboard's heatsink.

I've tried various drivers for the sound card to no avail. I'm running XP 32bit (SP3), E8400 and HD4870 and 4GB of RAM.
I've read it's something to do with an IRQ conflict. Any ideas? Any input is greatly appreciated!

[Noy]

Bump

[R_N_B]

Hello mate sorry for not responding sooner - the problem is not with your motherboard but rather with your sound card I would suggest. Make sure you have the latest drivers and that you have cleaned your registry up between driver updates.

Bottom line for me is that creative sound cards even the good ones are ruined by poor drivers and worse customer support by creative themselves. Most of the onboard sound solutions found on modern board are really good enough for 99% of users.

Good luck.

[Pottypete]

Hi,
Sent you PM with link for soundcard troubleshooting,
http://support.creative.com/kb/ShowArticle.aspx?url=http://ask.creative.com:80/SRVS/CGI-BIN/WEBCGI.exe/,/%3FSt=100,E=0000000000700437929,K=4809,Sxi=8,Answer51037=obj%2851037%29:obj%2851056%29
Regards

[Pottypete]

Hi,
There is a creative support pack available here,
It seems as SP£ win installs a wierd driver,
Worth a look,
Run the Daniel K. 2.0 support pack located here:

 

http://forums.creative.com/t5/Sound-Blaster/SB-X-Fi-Series-Support-Pack-2-0-05-15-2009/td-p/527485

 

This will install a fairly recent driver and newer updated applications for your system.  You might think "newer updated"?  that is redundant.  But what the driver package is is a compendum of fixes for compatibility across XP, Vista and Windows 7 for all of the applications for improved integration and the newest bug fixes in the applications.

 

Then you can update the rest of the applications with those listed on the Creative website if you wish.

 

Windows XP with SP3 always installs this strange driver for the sound card upon a clean install but I did think that they had posted a newer driver that windows update shoudl have picked up for you.  Anyway, install the support pack 2.0  (soon to be 3.0 if we can get our resident guru Dan K. to update it) and all should be well for you.  A lot of people install their driver CD from Creative and then update from the web or from an auto updater installed from the CD, but those applications and the method in which they are installed really bog your machine down.  Give this a shot, it works wonderfully.

[Noy]

Thanks for the info Pottypete. I've tried downloading that support pack but it did not help.

I uninstalled the previous drivers. Entered Safe Mode and ran DriverSweeper. Restarted and installed that support pack. Restarted and checked the sound was working etc. I then shut down my computer and logged into Windows w/o any sound.

[Pottypete]

Hi,
why is the drivers setup not being saved is the question?
I had a similar problem when I installed SP3, I had to uninstal and go back to SP2 and it worked great,
Install SP3 No sound, crazy,
Try going back to SP2 to see if it works, you can reinstall SP3 pack later,
You could clear cmos and try default settings!
If you remove The sound card, Does your onboard sound work?
Have you a resouce conflict in  sound card properties with your HD sound on the HD4870?
Will that card wiork in that slot? as I think it may be only x1,

Keep trying m8
Cheers

[Pottypete]

Hi,
Further to the  my last  post,
If you look in your manual on page 12 see note4,
The pci expressx4 slot shares bandwidth with the 3 pci express x1 slots,
When it is populated with a x4 card, the3 pci express slotsx1 will become unavailable,
I think therein lies your problem,
Regards

[Noy]

Hi again,

By no sound I mean I only get sound on a restart not from a shutdown-power on (just in case you thought I have no sound completely). When I used the onboard sound I don't believe I had a problem. I don't wanna install SP2 at the moment. I'm not sure if I've had a resource conflict. How can I check that? I also don't have anything in the PCI-E x4 slot. I'll next try to clear the cmos. If that doesn't help then I'll try running Windows 7.

Thanks again for the responses.

[R_N_B]

The nice thing about running Win7 is that you will not have to install any drivers unless you particularly want to. In fact the only two drivers that I install are the latest Intel inf which I download directly from the Intel site, and the driver from AMD for my graphic card. The reason for the latter is simply because the Win7 version of the AMD driver is normally one month out of date for the ATi (AMD) based graphic cards. Other than that all my stuff, including a rather pesky creative card work just fine then.

[Noy]

OK I've tried clearing the CMOS and still nothing. I guess Windows 7 is my last hope.

[Noy]

Problem solved. I put the card in the x4 slot and all was well . Thanks for the help!

[Pottypete]

Hi, NOY
Happy you got it sorted m8,
Enjoy