Greetings,
Based on what I read in
one review and
Santa Cruz Faq, I am going to miss the bells and whistles of Sound Blaster Live! Card. Those four awesome games and the Live Drive.
"Is it just my motherboard and chipset? Unfortunately no. Users of a wide cross-section of motherboards with Ali V, Via and even Intel i815 and 440BX chipsets have experienced one or more of these issues."
"What causes the awful crackling? It appears to be a combination of several factors, ranging from poor hardware and driver design on the part of Creative Labs to other factors such as ACPI. A very simplified explanation is that unless the card is allowed to hog the PCI bus when it wants to output sound, the sound stream is subject to sporadic interruption and this is what you hear as crackling. If you have a high performance video card, which utilizes the memory bus heavily, the chances are quite high that youll experience crackling with a Live! card."
How high is the volume when the crackling is audible?
SoundBlaster-VIA Solution Coming? Is it worth the wait for the fix? hmm.....
Santa Cruz is brighter and clearer than Sound Blaster Live according to
one review. I wonder how bright and clear Santa Cruz would be. How kewl are both cards to gamers' ears? Which one would you recommend?
New Home Built System Update:
Antec SX1030 + PP303X PSU
Asus A7V133 VIA Apollo KT133A Retail
AMD T-Bird 1.2GHz 266FSB Retail
Arctic Silver II Thermal Compound 3grams
Taisol CGK742092 Cooler (Socket A)
Crucial 256 SDRAM 133 CL2
ATI Radeon 64MB DDR 4X AGP VIVO Retail
MITSUMI Floppy Drive 1.44MB 3.5inch
Aopen DVD 1240 12X/40X Retail
Maxtor DiamondMax Hard Drive 7200 RPM ATA100 (40GB or 60GB)
Voyetra Turtle Beach Santa Cruz or Creative Lab Sound Blaster Platinum 5.1
Thanks in advance