sound card questions

Hi all,

I have a DFI lan party mobo, its pretty nice. However I'm using onboard sound and have been having some issues in BF2.

Occaisionally I'll compeltely freeze in game. Then the sound will start stuttering. Sometimes after about 10 seconds it will go back to normal. Other times I get disconnected from the server. It seems that many otehr people have this same sort of problem.

It seems to be pointing to the soundcard (but I haven't counted out the possibility that it could be network issues with my wireless setup).

Anyhow I've also tried a soundblaster live! card but the quality was shitty and the problem continued, even more often than with onboard sound.

So now I'm thinking about upgrading sound card. I don't want to spend a ton of money but I figure I need to get something decent.

I'm looking at either an Audigy 4 or the entry level X-Fi card. The audigy4 is almost half the price, is there a massive difference in quality/performance?

Hi all,

I have a DFI lan party mobo, its pretty nice. However I'm using onboard sound and have been having some issues in BF2.

Occaisionally I'll compeltely freeze in game. Then the sound will start stuttering. Sometimes after about 10 seconds it will go back to normal. Other times I get disconnected from the server. It seems that many otehr people have this same sort of problem.

It seems to be pointing to the soundcard (but I haven't counted out the possibility that it could be network issues with my wireless setup).

Anyhow I've also tried a soundblaster live! card but the quality was shitty and the problem continued, even more often than with onboard sound.

So now I'm thinking about upgrading sound card. I don't want to spend a ton of money but I figure I need to get something decent.

I'm looking at either an Audigy 4 or the entry level X-Fi card. The audigy4 is almost half the price, is there a massive difference in quality/performance?


I just bought an X-fi music yesterday, installed it. Listened to some music and played some games. It was definitely better then the on-board I was using. I then started looking on some websites and noticed the Audigy 4 was on sale, $50 cdn. The x-fi was about $170 after taxes. I took it back and got the Audigy 4. I don’t notice anything quality wise for sound.

if the Live didn't make the problem go away it's probably not the sound card.

Have you tried testing on a wired connection yet? Is your system running hot? Is the HDD being accessed?