Daryl C. W. O’Shea: Lazy Network Engineer

Creative SB Audigy 2 causing system lockups

April 18th, 2007

I’m an idiot. How over the span of 4 years I didn’t figure out that it was my Creative SB Audigy 2 causing my system to lock up I don’t know. I could have sworn that the card had sat on my desk while the problems continued. As far as I know (and I really don’t care to really look into it) the Audigy 2 doesn’t like whatever chipsets were used by Asus for their A7A266s and A7Vs. Nor do they like to run on MSI KT4Vs. Setting PCI latency to an insane value of 256 doesn’t help (at least on the KT4V). As soon as the system asks the card to do something there’s a good chance it’s going to hang the system.

Of course I never noticed the correlation between “sound” and “crash” since, before two weeks ago, I very rarely had my stereo switched to the computer sound. Usually it was on the radio or television. After getting a high speed wireless link setup on April 7th and listening to radio stations over the internet, and experiencing 6+ system lockups a day a couple days in a row, I finally clued in.

Frickin’ Creative. Not even the absurdity of buying THX from Lucas Film and giving THX approval to all your sound cards (how does that work… I’ve got the requirements for cinema THX specs and they don’t appear to apply very well to computer sound cards) could make me want to run out and buy another one from you. I can’t believe that the best sound card I ever had was an Adlib Gold (straight from the 80’s).

Entry Filed under: Technology