Sound Distortion when playing games

[Kalivos]

Hey guys. I have a Sounblaster X-fi XtremeMusic, and it worked fine before. I recently upgraded my system, formatted and re-installed windows and all of my drivers. But now when I play games, the card randomly gives the most annoying sound distortion ever. It's the worst when playing any FPS and WoW. Barely happens when listening to music. Any suggestions/ideas help.

 

[grumperfish]

It could be getting interference from something on your board. Move the x-fi to a lower slot farther away from your videocard. Additionally, you could try running the pci latency tool (it lets you mess around with IRQ-latency settings-> lowing your vid. card's to 192 rather than the default is generally recommended to fix problems with the 2 interacting- possibly why it happens during games) if simply moving the card doesn't help much. Another possibility is completely removing the drivers with driver cleaner pro and then reinstalling the latest set from Creative's website.


Edit: If you have a PCI-E videocard you won't need to edit it's IRQ latency and isn't supported, but raising your x-fi's irq latency to something like 64 might still help. If your vid. card isn't recognized and it's agp, google for a 2.x version of the tool instead.

 

[Kalivos]

Update: I'm getting tons of distortion AND SCP now. The SCP is pretty bad. I've switched over to onboard audio for now and have been reading that this is a very big problem with Creative cards.

It never did this until the new windows install. Any more suggestions? changing the pci slot and messing with latency hasn't really done anything.

Also, the sound now cuts out while playing WoW after about 10 seconds, then comes back in with loud screeching sounds. Creative FTL > : (