Crackling, Distortion problems NOT fixed with the Prelude

[Donnie27]

Most of the folks (certainly not all) have a common problem. Certain nVidia Chipsets. Many of these have to do with slower than standard PCI BUS/slots that have slower response times than what Creative recommends.
Other problematic circumstances.
Over burdened Power Supplies
SLI and even SLI + PPU.
Extreme Overclocking.
nVidia Chipsets.
Out of date BIOS on any chipset.
Poorly setup BIOS.
Chipset/BIOS that only provide FAKE PCI Steering and Sharing. FOr the record, mine is sharing and working perfectly right now.

X-Fi can be a Bad pick for some users.

What is snap crackle pop SCP, When data is missing, the missing data is represented as a S or C or a P. The X-FI is a BUS mastering card and needs its data at a very fast rate and with low latency. If this doesn't happen you get SCP. (NOT THE ONLY REASON)

I saw this first hand. My 939 Asus A8N (16) SLI works perfectly with X-FI though I had to use two different BIOS flashes to get it working. It worked without a BIOS flash on my Gigabyte DS3. I tested a Asus A8N 32 SLI and Bang, SCP but only intermediately or sometimes. Added Second video card and it got much worse. What I saw was a very mixed bag of results with some folks' system working and others screwed to hell and back.

I also noticed that X-Fi in any form loves 100% solid state boards. So with that nice rig you have, X-Fi problems are NOT worth it at all. It hasn't been long enough for you to not be given a RMA. Send that sucker back and get one of the CMedia based Cards. These will do very little on card processing don't rely on super fast response times. So, NO SCP with them.