Yeah, the card's not working, the SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum for PCIe. And trying to get customer-/tech-support from Creative has been a counter-productive nightmare. Trying to get help via their website shortly after getting the card in early-June was a no-go--I shouldn't have bothered to try. I just about an hour ago got an opportunity to attempt to get the help I needed by phone. I was on hold for a half-hour, and then spoke with some guy with a thick accent of some kind that I could barely understand what he was saying for more than an hour after that. All he seemed to want to do was get off the phone and not deal with any tech-probs, then near the end after over an hour he wants to pass the buck to Realtek, and then onto some "tech-friends" of mine that I don't actually have because he just pulled that out of his ass.
Plainly that company doesn't want to be bothered with customers from which they've already gotten money from. I don't think I wanna buy any more products from Creative anymore. But I sure already bought this one!
So what's the problem? There doesn't seem to be any special sound at all that I didn't hear already before I got the card. And I have a LOT of programs, mostly games, that allow for the option of EAX. But none of them recognize that any EAX is present, nor that any sound-card at all is present, and shifts me right back down to the lowest, most basic software sound (or whatever it is) sometimes called Miles somethin' somethin'. The sole, solitary exception to that was
Doom³. Switching on the EAX 4, it sounded mind-blowingly unbelievable--about the highest quality sounds I've
ever heard hehehe Though I could tell that it would have sounded even much better than that if I had some rather better quality speakers. But that was only brief. It don't sound so good no more. Heh, hardly worth (so far?) the like $50US that I paid for that card!
Worse, the Creative AutoUpdate program is the stupidest, most whack program that maybe I've ever seen! When I installed it and ran it, it wanted to update a LOT of stuff, wanted to download and install from like 14 or something installers. Would have been no problem, even a breeze...except that it tried to install all of them at once, madly filling my screen with a myriad of error messages. I had to force a reset by physically pressing the Reset button on the front of my tower to get out of that, because all that *beep* froze my computer. It also killed the one good sounding program that I had: the aforementioned
Doom³.
What can I do to get this thing working properly? I uninstalled all the Creative stuff from my computer and then re-d/led and installed the latest drivers from Creative's site. There's a volume-control icon in the system-tray right now that says: "Realtek Digital Output: 100%".
The lazy, know-nothing bastard on the phone at Creative said that the next step could not be done until I first disabled the Realtek whatever-the-*beep*-it-is. But he wouldn't tell me how to do that, told me to contact Realtek for that. Well, hell! Why did I just be on the phone with him for The past hour-and-a-half!? What, just THAT!? ??? Yep!
How do I get this to work properly? If this can be gotten to work properly, then I'll make a donation to this Tech Report Forum via debit-card in the beginning of next month (Oct., 2011). Hey, why not? I sure won't be giving a penny to Creative anymore!