FireDemon666
04-05-2007, 06:35 PM
In the beginning of January, I purchased and became the proud owner of a Razer Barracuda AC-1 gaming audio card.
Seen here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829153001
First impressions of the card were ace. The EMI shield, realtime DTS encoding, and dedicated interface for the Barracuda gaming headset, as well as the reviews it was receiving seemed very promising. After installing and fiddling around with the card, my first thoughts were, "Wow. Great piece of equipment here. Excellent audio quality and certainly trumps my Audigy 2."
Now, 3 months later down the road, I see the card through a different lens. After first researching the card and It's Vista compatibility, I figured I'd play the waiting game anticipating the arrival of proper drivers just around the corner as several other manufacturers were dealing with the same issue at the time.
It is now the beginning of April, 3 months later and still NO sight nor sound of any vista drivers for this card. What makes things worse is that It's current set of XP drivers are a big steaming pile. HALF of my games are rendered useless, as the system becomes highly unstable.
I just got finished booting FlatOut 2 for the first time and was going absolutely ecstatic with the way the game looked. After no more than 60 seconds into the game, horrible BLEEEEEEEEEP's and BLIIIIIIIIIIIIIIP's and BOP BOP BOP's came blasting through the speakers, which lead to an instant BSOD with the driver DLL file listed as the culprit. Tried moving the card to a different PCI slot, and got the same effect. Tried assigning different IRQ's to that slot through the bios with no improvement. Many of my games, such as Oblivion, Hitman Blood Money, and Tomb raider Legends have this same issue. Some do it only occasionally, some more often than others, and some to an unbearable frequency which makes the game unplayable. Now it has escalated to BSOD.
Razer sat there on their butts for 3 months promising Vista compatibility and a proper set of drivers. Since the time of purchase all the other manufacturers have released stable and working 32 bit Vista drivers and are preparing to launch 64 bit editions. Razer however has NOT had ANY driver release since December 11th. They could post "ETA April 2nd" on their Vista support page, however here we sit April 5th and still nothing. What worries me worse is that page is now a dead link. It leads right back to the Razer homepage. What is even more interesting, is when I directly Inquired about the 32 and 64 bit Vista drivers, as well as the cards future compatibility with OpenAL, they seemed very tight lipped. Giving me the response that they, "Had a team working on Vista drivers and could not release any further information at this time", and immediately closed my ticket.
As it is now I am going to RMA this damn thing and replace it with an Auzentech X-Mystique. Razer, you had something going here, but you failed to provide your customer with the appropriate service. I read countless replies in the Razer knowledge base about end users smashing their products and sending them back because of the lack of support. Now or never. How many more customers will you lose to this kind of treatment?
Seen here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829153001
First impressions of the card were ace. The EMI shield, realtime DTS encoding, and dedicated interface for the Barracuda gaming headset, as well as the reviews it was receiving seemed very promising. After installing and fiddling around with the card, my first thoughts were, "Wow. Great piece of equipment here. Excellent audio quality and certainly trumps my Audigy 2."
Now, 3 months later down the road, I see the card through a different lens. After first researching the card and It's Vista compatibility, I figured I'd play the waiting game anticipating the arrival of proper drivers just around the corner as several other manufacturers were dealing with the same issue at the time.
It is now the beginning of April, 3 months later and still NO sight nor sound of any vista drivers for this card. What makes things worse is that It's current set of XP drivers are a big steaming pile. HALF of my games are rendered useless, as the system becomes highly unstable.
I just got finished booting FlatOut 2 for the first time and was going absolutely ecstatic with the way the game looked. After no more than 60 seconds into the game, horrible BLEEEEEEEEEP's and BLIIIIIIIIIIIIIIP's and BOP BOP BOP's came blasting through the speakers, which lead to an instant BSOD with the driver DLL file listed as the culprit. Tried moving the card to a different PCI slot, and got the same effect. Tried assigning different IRQ's to that slot through the bios with no improvement. Many of my games, such as Oblivion, Hitman Blood Money, and Tomb raider Legends have this same issue. Some do it only occasionally, some more often than others, and some to an unbearable frequency which makes the game unplayable. Now it has escalated to BSOD.
Razer sat there on their butts for 3 months promising Vista compatibility and a proper set of drivers. Since the time of purchase all the other manufacturers have released stable and working 32 bit Vista drivers and are preparing to launch 64 bit editions. Razer however has NOT had ANY driver release since December 11th. They could post "ETA April 2nd" on their Vista support page, however here we sit April 5th and still nothing. What worries me worse is that page is now a dead link. It leads right back to the Razer homepage. What is even more interesting, is when I directly Inquired about the 32 and 64 bit Vista drivers, as well as the cards future compatibility with OpenAL, they seemed very tight lipped. Giving me the response that they, "Had a team working on Vista drivers and could not release any further information at this time", and immediately closed my ticket.
As it is now I am going to RMA this damn thing and replace it with an Auzentech X-Mystique. Razer, you had something going here, but you failed to provide your customer with the appropriate service. I read countless replies in the Razer knowledge base about end users smashing their products and sending them back because of the lack of support. Now or never. How many more customers will you lose to this kind of treatment?