Soundcard causing games to crash and best gaming card for $100?

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samduhman

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I'm doubtful its the sound card but still I'm not ruling it out. That is two of my latest games crashing to desktop every time I play. Red Orchestra 2 and Battlefield 3. It could be they are just littered with bugs since I haven't had this issue with other games.

I'm running an Auzentech Forte sound card. Is there anyway to check if the card is the issue, other than trying another card?

I've been getting the itch to replace it with a more popular brand anyway so I'm just looking for an excuse to replace it. ;) Whats a good gaming sound card for a $100 or less? I don't listen to music that often so it's all about the gaming sound.

Currently using cheap speakers Logitech X-540 5.1 (my old Z-5500s died over the summer) and Sennheiser HD-555 headphones.

thanks
 
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The Xonar DG is a decent gaming card for $25 or so, although it doesn't have a separate headphone jack, so it's not great for combo speaker/headphone setups. It does a good job with the HD555s though.
 
i would wait for the new soundblaster Recon 3d review.

they are available for order but i would still wait more reviews.

the people who own them reported no known crashing, craks, pops, hissing, etc.
 
DualOwn said:
i would wait for the new soundblaster Recon 3d review.

they are available for order but i would still wait more reviews.

the people who own them reported no known crashing, craks, pops, hissing, etc.
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I would not. There will be no more sound blaster components bought by me, to many driver issues over the years. Cheap hardware at a premium price with poor driver support.
 
Snufykat said:
I would not. There will be no more sound blaster components bought by me, to many driver issues over the years. Cheap hardware at a premium price with poor driver support.
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cheap hardware? lol

maybe drivers suck, but not everyone has problems with them.

when it works, they offer best sound quality than anything else out there.

titanium hd is still the best sound card imo today when it comes to money to performance ratio, same with games and music.
 
I think I'm going to hold off after doing bit of research today. It appears my Forte still is a very decent sound card worth holding onto. So I need to step back and see if I can figure out what is causing those games to crash... I'm pretty sure its bugs in the games. I play a lot of different games and the rest play without issue.

It will also give me time to wait for Recon3d reviews.

For those of you wondering about a good sound card for under $100. Before I decided to hold onto my Forte I had pretty much decide on one. The Asus Xonar DX or D1 depending on whether I was going PCI or PCI express seemed like a good choice.
 
DualOwn said:
cheap hardware? lol

maybe drivers suck, but not everyone has problems with them.

when it works, they offer best sound quality than anything else out there.

titanium hd is still the best sound card imo today when it comes to money to performance ratio, same with games and music.
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I don't know. The LME49710NA in the Titanium HD is a pretty cheap amp and creative way overcharges for it. It's a class AB amp. You can get class A amps for a lot less than creative is charging.

You can easily pop out the opamp on the Titanium HD and put in a better one though. It would be a lot better to just build your own USB sound card though. You can get a better DAC and better opamp than what the Titanium HD uses for $50 and also use much better dedicated power circuitry.

IMO what hurts the Titanium HD the most in terms of sound quality is the dirty power it gets from the PC.
 
SirMaster said:
I don't know. The LME49710NA in the Titanium HD is a pretty cheap amp and creative way overcharges for it. It's a class AB amp. You can get class A amps for a lot less than creative is charging.

You can easily pop out the opamp on the Titanium HD and put in a better one though. It would be a lot better to just build your own USB sound card though. You can get a better DAC and better opamp than what the Titanium HD uses for $50 and also use much better dedicated power circuitry.

IMO what hurts the Titanium HD the most in terms of sound quality is the dirty power it gets from the PC.
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going by what u like then titanium hd is the sound card for you.

why bother with sound card amps when you prefer external amp and dac.

why waste money on soundcards that cost more with better amp?

am i right?

i bought titanium hd few days ago, it was $99 dollars on amazon and its been perfect so far.

when i get hifi headphones with 250ohms i will be getting an external amp.

so you see? why bother with expensive sound cards with a better amp to drive 32ohm headphones since you, me and many others prefer external amplifers anyway, right? right? right?

ohh and, what the hell is dirty power? are you using batteries to run a pc without a decent power supply and home electricity? where you from? lol
 
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DualOwn said:
cheap hardware? lol

maybe drivers suck, but not everyone has problems with them.

when it works, they offer best sound quality than anything else out there.

titanium hd is still the best sound card imo today when it comes to money to performance ratio, same with games and music.
Click to expand...

I LOVE the "when it works" portion of that response.
 
DualOwn said:
going by what u like then titanium hd is the sound card for you.

why bother with sound card amps when you prefer external amp and dac.

why waste money on soundcards that cost more with better amp?

am i right?

i bought titanium hd few days ago, it was $99 dollars on amazon and its been perfect so far.

when i get hifi headphones with 250ohms i will be getting an external amp.

so you see? why bother with expensive sound cards with a better amp to drive 32ohm headphones since you, me and many others prefer external amplifers anyway, right? right? right?

ohh and, what the hell is dirty power? are you using batteries to run a pc without a decent power supply and home electricity? where you from? lol
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I was just saying that you can get better a better DAC and a better opamp chip for $50 than you find in the Titanium HD so that would be the best deal.

As far as dirty power, a normal computer power-supply puts out far from ideal power to power audio equipment.

The PSU in your PC is built on efficiency and there isn't a very strict limitation on how much the voltages and currents can fluctuate. This is fine in powering a CPU or a video card, etc, but any fluctuations in power have a negative impact on the ability for an opamp to perform properly.

When your computer goes under different workloads such as when you are playing a game, I can guarantee even a high-end PSU has fluctuations in it's voltages and currents.

With audio, you typically want a dedicated power circuit from your breaker for your audio equipment and you want to use a power-supply designed specifically for stable and un-fluctuating power rather than efficiency. And also for the powersupply to be powering only your audio equipment so it doesn't fluctuate when other devices draw more power.

http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story3&reid=262

Notice the different voltages across the power circuits on a power-supply like the OCZ 750W. Also check out the oscilloscope results. For your audio, you want a power-suplpy that if it needs 5v, it gets 5.00v not 4.91v under one load and 5.02v a few moments later.

That's all I was trying to get at.
 
SirMaster said:
I was just saying that you can get better a better DAC and a better opamp chip for $50 than you find in the Titanium HD so that would be the best deal.

As far as dirty power, a normal computer power-supply puts out far from ideal power to power audio equipment.

The PSU in your PC is built on efficiency and there isn't a very strict limitation on how much the voltages and currents can fluctuate. This is fine in powering a CPU or a video card, etc, but any fluctuations in power have a negative impact on the ability for an opamp to perform properly.

When your computer goes under different workloads such as when you are playing a game, I can guarantee even a high-end PSU has fluctuations in it's voltages and currents.

With audio, you typically want a dedicated power circuit from your breaker for your audio equipment and you want to use a power-supply designed specifically for stable and un-fluctuating power rather than efficiency. And also for the powersupply to be powering only your audio equipment so it doesn't fluctuate when other devices draw more power.

http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story3&reid=262

Notice the different voltages across the power circuits on a power-supply like the OCZ 750W. Also check out the oscilloscope results. For your audio, you want a power-suplpy that if it needs 5v, it gets 5.00v not 4.91v under one load and 5.02v a few moments later.

That's all I was trying to get at.
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Mostly all electronic components have tolerances because it's cheaper for companies to produce a mass amount of their product and then assign them to groups based on their production quality (Just look up resistor color bands). Even high quality components have tolerances.

Most people won't be able to tell the difference if their sound card is receiving too little or too much voltage. The sound card would probably be one of the last things i would worry about if there is too much voltage going through my components.

I'm doubtful its the sound card but still I'm not ruling it out. That is two of my latest games crashing to desktop every time I play. Red Orchestra 2 and Battlefield 3. It could be they are just littered with bugs since I haven't had this issue with other games.

I'm running an Auzentech Forte sound card. Is there anyway to check if the card is the issue, other than trying another card?

I've been getting the itch to replace it with a more popular brand anyway so I'm just looking for an excuse to replace it. Whats a good gaming sound card for a $100 or less? I don't listen to music that often so it's all about the gaming sound.

Currently using cheap speakers Logitech X-540 5.1 (my old Z-5500s died over the summer) and Sennheiser HD-555 headphones.

thanks
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As far as the OP's crashing with the Auzentech, BF3 has had a lot of issues since it started. I managed to figure out most of the issues for the game for myself and other friends.

Punkbuster has caused my game to crash, after running the updater located in the BF3 folder as a administrator, i haven't had an issue.

32-bit windows 7/vista users get frequent crashes to desktop. They have to increase the amount of virtual memory on their computer to fix this issue.

i would wait for the new soundblaster Recon 3d review.

they are available for order but i would still wait more reviews.

the people who own them reported no known crashing, craks, pops, hissing, etc.
Click to expand...

The people who have experienced those issues don't have 'bit-match playback' checked or the clock set correctly in the drivers. They buy a card that they haven't done any research on and complain once its popping and crackling because they haven't looked into setting the clock on the drivers..

As far as creative having terrible driver support, that's why you look for a third party group that fixes the issues in the drivers.

For creative/Auzentech that would be PAX

I can honestly say that I have never had an issue/crash that was caused by a driver from my Titanium HD
 
just played BF3 with the new Recond 3d sound card, and it was awesome.

voice chat, sound, etc were all greatly seperated in harmony, maybe due to 4 dsp's instead of 1.

drivers installed under 30 seconds, robooted and played bf3 hour an hour, no crashing, cracking, popping, hissing, etc.

this sound card/drivers are extremely win 7 friendly.
 
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NoTrigger said:
Mostly all electronic components have tolerances because it's cheaper for companies to produce a mass amount of their product and then assign them to groups based on their production quality (Just look up resistor color bands). Even high quality components have tolerances.

Most people won't be able to tell the difference if their sound card is receiving too little or too much voltage. The sound card would probably be one of the last things i would worry about if there is too much voltage going through my components.
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Yes I understand why computer supplies have tolerances and that they aren't designed with audio quality in mind. But since we are talking about the Titanium HD, presumably people are looking for a best sound quality they can get for that price. The HD can drive quite high-end headphones which some of these people have and people looking to do that are doing it because they are interested in their sound quality.

If you are willing to spend over $100 on a sound card then you obviously rate sound quality pretty high and thus I believe that those types of people would be able to tell the difference.

If you have a $100+ sound card then I'm going to assume you have $200+ headphones because that's what makes sense in terms of maximizing audio quality. You are severely wasting money if you have <$200 headphones and spent $100+ on the sound card. You should have put $25 into the Xonar and that extra $75 into the headphones to maximize quality/$

A headphone like the $~290 Sennheiser HD600 benefits greatly from better and better amps ranging all the way up to $1000 even. It really unlocks the true potential. so any improvement you can make upon a basic $100 sound card dac/amp is going to make a discernible difference in sound quality on a high-end set of headphones like those.

I have heard the stock Titanium HD and I have also heard the same DAC/Amp that the Titanium uses except only in an external USB custom-built amp and there was a discernible difference that I'm pretty sure is because of the better supply of power. It's really the main variable that was different between the setups.

I wasn't trying to speak theoretically, I try to speak from experience.
 
Have you disabled other sound devices on your system?

I know I get game crashes if both my Auzentech soundcard and nvidia audio devices are active at the same time. You can either uninstall the drivers for the nvidia/realtek/AMD sound or you can just disable them in device manager.
 
Bah. I just run digital out of my mobo into a nice receiver. Problem solved.

Otherwise, get Asus if you no likey creative.
 
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