Help Me chose a soundcard

I have a windows xp compaq. I took it to a computer shop and had a soundcard put in after the soundchip on my mother board went the way of the dodo bird. So had a soundcard put in soundcard was a creative . Problem is my computer is not compatible with creative soundcards because I have chipset NVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE . most people may not be aware but their is a huge issue with creative and NVIDIA . its even talked about on the creative forum website . many people are experiencing problems running creative with NVIDIA in their machines . and neither creative or NVIDIA can come up with a solution to the problem. whats the issue ? the creative cards crack and static pop on the audio ..... had one put in crack pop, guy put another in crack pop . so I will need to go with an entirely different brand of soundcard . and not sure which one to go with. the guy i take my computer to says he has only used creative and never any other brand so basically he could not offer me any help on chosing a brand. i have googled and read but still not sure what to go with. can you guys offer me advice on a good NON creative soundcard

Edited by gonefishin, 16 December 2009 - 07:22 PM.

What do you expect from your sound card? Are you going to play lots of games, or watch movies, or just listen to music? Depending on what you want to do, here are a couple choices.

If all you want to do is listen to music with no extra frills whatsoever and you have a free USB slot, think about this model: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16829128004

If you want to enjoy 5.1 surround sound for games or movies, you can consider this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16829118105

Lastly, if you are considering on trying your hand at music production and have money to burn, this is the way to go: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16829121120

Of all these products, I have personally used something similar to the first (same idea, different appearance) and I have the same model as the third. I have had no issues with any of them myself.

TurtleBeach
http://www.turtlebeach.com/products/soundcards.aspx

I was talking to the company turtle beach they have a youtube channel. i asked him if his sound cards would be compatible with my computer . he asked me more information so i sent him the technical details from creative

TECHNICAL DETAILS

We have observed through direct observation of the PCI bus on the nVidia nForce 4 motherboards that when the crackle symptoms are occuring, the Soundblaster X-Fi card PCI bus master memory requests for audio data are being held off (not serviced) for very long intervals.

We have observed peak holdoffs of up to 2 milliseconds in some cases. This is unusual chipset behavior that is beyond the ability of a hardware audio accelerator to compensate for in its internal buffering. The SoundBlaster X-Fi tolerance for these PCI holdoffs is approximately 120 microseconds peak holdoff, with a 1 microsecond average holdoff.

These design tolerances are based on observation of real PCI bus behavior on leading motherboards over a period of many motherboard hardware generations.

The nForce 4 motherboard is the first motherboard on which these extremely long PCI service holdoffs have been observed by Creative, where another PCI device in the system was not causing the holdoff.

He then replied with the following

Re: turtle beach soundcards
Sounds like a hardware issue with the nVidia design. I would guess that our sound cards would also have this problem because it's a PCI interrupt problem caused by the nVidia chip set.

Does this mean no soundcard is gonna work because i have NVIDIA in my computer ?

It could be helpful to run Sysinternals' DPC (Deferred Procedure Call) Latency Checker:

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

A problem as described is likely to affect any sound card. You could try using a USB module as suggested and see if USB is unaffected, likewise assuming the Creative card is PCI not PCIe, and that's where the problem is, a PCIe card may be OK.

Also if your system has the 430 southbridge with the ActiveArmor firewall operating, it could be worth trying with that turned off, it was credited with causing some problems and firewalls are one thing that can cause DPC latency.

I downloaded the tool DPC Latency Checker. it shows some device drivers bad on machine . it also tells me to disable certain devices . I have a question . what happens if I disable under network devices NVIDIA nforce network controller . will it cause me any problems ????

also can i disable nvidia network bus emumerator . and be able to click it back on enabled as well.....

don't know to much about these things. thought i better ask before i disable some thing and end up with a computer that goes dead and wont come back on

Disabling the network controller will cause the LAN to stop working, so for example the system would lose internet connectivity. I don't know of any situations where disabling these devices/drivers has caused unrecoverable problems, but you can always take the precaution of backing up the registry if you wish before making changes, using a utility such as Erunt.

Another first option to try could be just temporarily disabling the network hardware in the BIOS setup (ie LAN, modem.. ). Are the nForce motherboard drivers up-to-date?

Edited by Platypus, 17 December 2009 - 06:06 PM.

I disabled the NVIDIA n force network controller. just knocked internet off was all . tested the dpc latency and it was still in red .

Am i supposed to move around when the dpc latency is running. because when i move the mouse up or down thats when it starts going red

platypus I found some thing interesting out. I just disabled creative Live! SB ( WMD) and i can move the mouse up down and all around. no red bars. enabled creative Live! and in comes the red bars again.

If it really is just a total clash between the way Creative and nVidia do things, it could save a lot of guessing and experimenting if there is any way you could arrange to borrow a non-Creative soundcard for a while, and see what it does. I know that mightn't be easy to achieve...

Failing the above possibility, a few thoughts:

Confirm the on-board sound is disabled in the BIOS setup. Boot into Safe Mode (repeatedly tap F8 during startup if unfamiliar with Safe Mode) and look in Device Manager. If any "phantom" drivers are shown for the previous on-board sound, remove them.

Try the soundcard in a different PCI slot if available.

on device manager under display adapters . it says NVIDIA Geforce 6150 LE

can i disable this ? or would it cause problems

Definitely don't disable the display adaptor, having no display would be a problem!

If you had two display adaptors, you could temporarily disable the secondary adaptor as a diagnosis measure.