Crackling, Left Rear Channel noise, IRQs, 4 Gigs of Memory, fixes and problems with XFi Fatal

Question

Hello fellow troubleshooters. Well I've been working on my XFI issues since there are so many of them trying to make the one piece in my newly built system work as intended. I will put my hardware info below this post for comparison purposes if it helps you at all or for feedback/ideas. Well first off I had the crackling noise popping so on even when my machine was idle. If you have not done this yet do it
!!! Start, Control Panel, Sounds Speech and Audio Device, Change Speaker Settings, Advanced (in device volume), ok now there is a bunch of sliders go to "options" check everything, ok now that you see all the sliders mute Everything besides: Play Control, Wave, CD Player for testing purpose. You will probably hear a difference as you do it. Especially Mic 2. Ok well that issue resolved my popping crackling noises when idle. Ok so I still have a shared IRQ issue since I have an Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe board and the slots go as such PCI-E, PCI, PCI, PCI-E, PCI. Well since the GeForce 7800 GTX cards I have take up not just the PCI-E slot, but also the PCI slot is covered from the Huge Fan. Then the Same thing for the Second graphics card. So I have only one slot that works for my PCI Fatalty sound card. Well this forces me to share PCI IRQ between one of the Video Cards and the Sound Card. Its not a "conflict" it is simply sharing the IRQ, after the above issue fixed my popping issue this no longer was a concern. Now my big issue is that I sent my Sub Woofer in for RMA, I have the Gigaworks S750 7. THX speakers, they are great but when I really crank up the volume on them I would get the sound like a speaker was blown in the left rear channel, so I swapped another speaker in its place and I have the same problem. So the RMA folks said to send in the Sub Woofer which cost me over $30 to ship the thing only to have them tell me there is no problem. Well I had recently done RMAs on my sound card, both Video Cards, and my mother board too in hopes of fixing the next problem. So everything is new though I got a refurb on the mobo. So I'm just waiting on my Sub woofer now so I'm using my headphones and guess what I'm finding there is this noise in the left speaker, an issue I sent the headphones back for a long time ago when I was using them waiting to buy my speakers. I have the Creative Pro Gamer headphones. So now I read a post about someone else with the same issue left channel, and I have to wonder I am not alone and that usually means in Creative Labs land there probably is others with this issue that have spouses that wont let them stretch their audiophile legs with extreme volume, if this is you try it out kick up the bass, and see if you have this problem too, if so please post it here. I have no clue on this one and I am open to any ideas. Ok and the last issue!! This is the real problem I'm facing now. I play EQ2 I love my MMO titles with the occassional single player title for those short stints at the computer between work, parenting, and stuff my wife demands be started before she finishes speaking of it (those of you married know what I'm talking about). I have 2 operating systems, XP Home, and XP Pro 64. Home I use for Office, graphic design, and general applications. XP Pro 64 I use purely for gaming. All my games are installed through this OS which is on my 2 74 Gig Raptors in Raid 0, I have another Partition for XP Home, and a 3rd for all the game installs. So I recently found that after selecting Extreme Graphics option in EQ2 then moving the rest of the sliders to Max that my G5 keyboard which has a performance monitor in it showing the amount of Ram usage showed me hitting about 90% and would spilke at the same time as I found I had frame rate slowdown. So I decided to get 2 more gigs of Corsair Twin XMS 3500Pro 024x2 memory bumping me up to 4 gigs. Well I had to go into the bios I found and change a memory setting to discrete and enable the memory hole in order for XP Pro 64 and the motherboard to see the memory. At this time I was working on other things with my computer, and suddenly the popping noise came back so I'm pissed now.... But oddly its not happening in XP home, only in XP 64. So I'm thinking I may have to go to XP home for my gaming OS, then just before I install home I remember that XP home wont register 4 gigs of memory.... So I go turn off the memory hole and discrete settings and this sets the memory to 2 gigs.... Crackling sound in ALL EAX GAMES goes away.... So now clearly my issue with my sound card and EAX crackling noise is Memory related somehow. Now I have isolated it to 4 gigs of memory, but it makes me think of those folks with this issue perhaps something is amiss with their memory and how it works with timing, or onboard memory on the sound card which is a first time memory is put on a sound card?.... Any input is appreciated as to how to repair this issue, thanks for reading, below is my system set up.
rocessor >
?Model:???? x AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor
??????4400+
?Speed:???? 2.2GHz
?Model Number:???? 4400 (estimated)
?Performance Rating:??? PR7072 (estimated)
?Cores per Processor:?? 2 Unit(s)
?Threads per Core:??? Unit(s)
?Type:????? Dual-Core
?Internal Data Cache:?? 2x 64kB Synchronous, Write-Back, 2-way set,
??????64 byte line size
?L2 On-board Cache:?? 2x MB ECC Synchronous, Write-Back, 6-way
??????set, 64 byte line size
?<Mainboard >
?Bus(es):???? ISA PCI PCIe USB FireWire/394 i2c/SMBus
?MP Support:???? 2 Processor(s)
?MP APIC:???? No
?System BIOS:??? American Megatrends Inc. 8.2
?System:????? System manufacturer System Product Name
?Mainboard:???? ASUSTeK Computer INC. A8N32-SLI-Deluxe
?Total Memory:???? 3.9GB DDR-SDRAM
?<Chipset >
?Model:???? Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Athlon 64 /
??????Opteron HyperTransport Technology
??????Configuration
?Front Side Bus Speed:?? 2x 005MHz (200MHz data rate)
?Total Memory:???? 4GB DDR-SDRAM
?Memory Bus Speed:??? 2x 200MHz (400MHz data rate)
?<Video System >
?Monitor/Panel:??? Default Monitor
?Monitor/Panel:??? HP D895 HP P20 2-inch Monitor
?Adapter:???? NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX
?Adapter:???? NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX
?hysical Storage Devices >
?Removable Dri've:??? Floppy disk dri've
?Hard Disk:???? WDC WD2500KS-00MJB0 (233GB)
?Hard Disk:???? WDC WD3200JD-00KLB0 (298GB)
?Hard Disk:???? NVIDIA? STRIPE? 38.49G
?Hard Disk:???? Generic USB CF Reader USB Device
?Hard Disk:???? Generic USB MS Reader USB Device
?Hard Disk:???? Generic USB SD Reader USB Device
?Hard Disk:???? Generic USB SM Reader USB Device
?CD-ROM/DVD:???? HL-DT-ST DVD-ROM GDR860B (CD 48X Rd) (DVD 6X
??????Rd)
?CD-ROM/DVD:???? HL-DT-ST DVD-ROM GDR860B (CD 48X Rd) (DVD 6X
??????Rd)
?CD-ROM/DVD:???? HL-DT-ST DVD-ROM GDR860B (CD 48X Rd) (DVD 6X
??????Rd)
?CD-ROM/DVD:???? HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-463B (CD 40X Rd, 40X Wr)
??????(DVD 5X Rd, 5X Wr)
?<Logical Storage Devices >
?.44MB 3.5" (A:??? N/A
?Applications - games - storage:233GB (5GB, 65% Free Space) (NTFS)
?Xp home (D:???? 24GB (5.6GB, 23% Free Space) (NTFS)
?CD-ROM/DVD (E:??? N/A
?Xp 64 (F:???? 24GB (5GB, 63% Free Space) (NTFS)
?Raptor games (G:?? 90GB (7GB, 8% Free Space) (NTFS)
?Ssdisk (H:???? 629MB (CDFS)
?Bf2xpack cd (I:??? 677MB (CDFS)
?Farstone (J:??? 00MB (CDFS)
?Removable Dri've (K:?? N/A
?Removable Dri've (L:?? N/A
?Removable Dri've (M:?? N/A
?Back up dri've (N:??? 298GB (3GB, 44% Free Space) (NTFS)
?Removable Dri've (O:?? N/A?EvolovE

Answer 1

Evolve,
I have the a8n-sli Premium which as you stated is basically the same board with a couple extra items. I have the latest beta bios ver -06. Since the early fall release the option which we will be talking about was available in the premium board which it I remember was Bios rev 9. I would download the latest bios rev.
07.04 (latest beta?or go with 06)?and flash in. Here are the steps to get the proper memory options to work and I have also included my system specs to compare.
) Hit Del to get into Bios
2) Go to the second tab on the top of the screen "Advanced"
3) Select the first option in the menu "CPU Configuration"
4) Select the first option in the "CPU Configuration" menu called "DRAM Configuration"
5) Select Manual configuration from the first Menu item.
6) The last two options in the same menu for DRAM are s/w remapping over 4G and h/w remapping over 4G. Select the "s/w remapping option over 4G" and enable it. Disable the "h/w remapping over 4G."?
7) Hit f0 and save the config.
You should now at post have 4GBws total but only 3GBs of usable memory and your X-fi should crush it in XP64 and XP32.
My Specs
A8n-sli premium (Bios -06)
amd X2 4400 (~2.5 GHZ)
4GB LL patriot memory (~228 HZ)
X-Fi Extreme Music
LSI 320-2e PCI express SCSI RAID controller (256MB buffer)
2x Seagate Cheata 5K.3?dri'ves
All water cooled
Good Luck
PapaH
By the way this is defiantly a XP64 driver problem because even with h/w remapping enabled in XP32 the card sounds fine. It only happens in XP64.