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So what would be a good system for WoW that isn't completely top end?
A German game hardware magazine promotes a Q8200+GTX260-216 and they argue that the multi-core is indeed good for WoW. I have conflicting posts about all this (see discussion here).
You looking to slap something together at home, Elsia? Or prefer something pre-assembled? And desktop or laptop?
Before knowing, a quick video recommendation. You don't really need a video card in the Nvidia GTX260/ATI 4870 (or better) power territory to run WoW well at high detail/resolution. Something in the Nvidia 8800 (or better) territory would work fine, while costing less (I've verified doing tech support for friends who play WoW).
Anyway, if I could get some info about the above, can provide some more detailed recommendations :).
I'm low-brow. I am very happy to play the game at 1280x1024 and I'm very happy to play with minimal graphical frills. I'm not happy to play at extremenly low frame rates when raiding. Though 30 fps while raiding is plenty in my book.
GTX 260-216 was recommended because it's currently on a price drop in Germany. Also if I upgrade I don't want to upgrade again when the next WoW erxpansion comes out, so I'm not gonna plan for the bare minimum.
I have a chassis and all the periphery is fine. I don't want to dump my case (tower) just to replace motherboard/cpu/gpu/mem. I already have gone through a mobo and gpu replacement thanks to both having fried out at some point. Buying a complete PC is a waste of a few 100 bucks. I'm happy to assemble as needed.
If I had a choice I'd just upgrade the CPU and see how much that helped, but I have an obsolete socket (959) board, so virtually any upgrade that promises to have some longevity means a motherboard/ram upgrade anyway.
But frankly I still think my current system should hack Wow and it does look somewhat better since 3.1 but still hadn't had a chance to raid. I am not going to upgrade now if my system remains sensibly playable. I'm scheduled to update in fall, which for many reasons will be logistically easier for me to pull off.
So what would be a good system for WoW that isn't completely top end?
A German game hardware magazine promotes a Q8200+GTX260-216 and they argue that the multi-core is indeed good for WoW. I have conflicting posts about all this (see discussion here).
If it's mainly for WoW I'd personally go for the Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 any multi-core gains you would have got from the Q8200 should easily be made up by the much faster clockspeed on the E8400 and you don't have to rely on multi-threading for your performance.
As for Ulduar seems much better than Naxx performance wise, don't seem to be dropping below 30 FPS and I'm running 1680x1050 res with full max settings other than shadows, with 8x multi-sampling. I'm running the E6850 which should be a bit slower than the processor I recommended to you.
I'm low-brow. I am very happy to play the game at 1280x1024 and I'm very happy to play with minimal graphical frills. I'm not happy to play at extremenly low frame rates when raiding. Though 30 fps while raiding is plenty in my book.
GTX 260-216 was recommended because it's currently on a price drop in Germany. Also if I upgrade I don't want to upgrade again when the next WoW erxpansion comes out, so I'm not gonna plan for the bare minimum.
I have a chassis and all the periphery is fine. I don't want to dump my case (tower) just to replace motherboard/cpu/gpu/mem. I already have gone through a mobo and gpu replacement thanks to both having fried out at some point. Buying a complete PC is a waste of a few 100 bucks. I'm happy to assemble as needed.
If I had a choice I'd just upgrade the CPU and see how much that helped, but I have an obsolete socket (959) board, so virtually any upgrade that promises to have some longevity means a motherboard/ram upgrade anyway.
But frankly I still think my current system should hack Wow and it does look somewhat better since 3.1 but still hadn't had a chance to raid. I am not going to upgrade now if my system remains sensibly playable. I'm scheduled to update in fall, which for many reasons will be logistically easier for me to pull off.
OK. Good choice actually...as long as your system can hack it in 3.1 (hopefully), no need to spend the moola on something new.
As you probably know, going AMD (as you currently have) will save money nearly all of the time over going Intel. The only reason I went with the Intel i7 here is I wanted to get near the top end (and I had to pay through the nose for the motherboard & memory...sobs quietly). Top end is not needed for WoW.
If you do buy something in the fall, recommendations will change from now, of course. You said "Socket 959"; did you mean Socket 939? Yep, that's an outdated socket :). The good news is that the current AMD motherboards in the "sweet spot" of value--Sockets "AM2" and "AM2+"--are reasonably priced.
The top current AMD motherboards use Socket "AM3" (it was just released recently); the only real advantage of which allows the use of overpriced DDR3 memory instead of perfectly adequate DDR2 that the earlier sockets use. Also, the AM3 motherboards can't use a lot of the current AMD CPUs (they use a different pin-out, among other things), so the CPUs and motherboard choices are going to be a lot more limited.
So a decent AM2+ motherboard is an inexpensive, decent choice. The AM2+ has a faster "HyperTransport" controller & can produce potentially more power savings over the regular AM2. One thing: an AMD CPU that can fit in an AM2 socket can also be used with an AM2+ socket. But...the two AM2+ differences above (among others) will not be utilized if you use a CPU designed for the AM2. It will function just like an AM2 board.
So if you get an AM2+ board, best to look for a CPU designed for it. Fortunately again, such CPUs generally don't command a major price premium over the older AM2 CPUs.
As to manufacturer, I always recommend going with a "big" brand name over the lowest of the low end. Not necessarily because of engineering or build quality on the board itself (though there often are differences), but because of the BIOS quality. Quality BIOSes, frequently updated (if needed) are always a good sign. Nearly all manufacturers use a "core" BIOS from a company such as AMI or Phoenix, then add code tailored to each motherboard. Its this tailoring that some companies get right (and updated) and some do not.
Suggestions, starting at lowest price & going up for each manufacturer. A whopping load of AMD motherboards have integrated video chips, some of which are not half bad. But most/all I've seen don't compare to discrete video cards. All "AMD 790GX" boards (none listed below) have integrated video:
Other reputable manufacturers as well, like "ASRock" (Asus's wholly owned low-priced-product subsidiary) & DFI.
------------------
As to video cards, yes, the Nvidia GeForce GTX260-216 is an excellent choice. It has the "GT200" chip, currently the top of the Nvidia line.
Lower priced & somewhat slower, yet still great (from top to bottom):
--the recently released GTS250 (essentially a "rebadged" 9800 GTX+ at a potentially lower price, the former top of the earlier 9xxx line. Its the same chip)
--9800GT
As to ATI...am an old time IT/PC guy here. ATI is currently making really great hardware. But unfortunately, I wouldn't touch their drivers with a 10-foot piece of wet bacon (mmmm). Year after year, they have continued to produce drivers with often outrageous problems with both the OS they are running on and with applications. On average, they are way more buggy than Nvidia drivers have been historically. I thought things would improve when they were bought by AMD, but it hasn't seemed like it.
Also ATI's driver control panel on Windows requires separate installation of Microsoft's .NET framework. 200 MB+ of bloat that few applications these days use. Many PCs have it already installed though. Vista includes it but XP does not, you have to get it separately for XP. In many circles (including the work environment here), using the .NET framework implies that you don't have the programming competence to write a solid C program without help :D.
Nvidia's drivers don't require .NET. In the end, its the driver history which makes me recommend Nvidia.
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For audio, no real need to spend $100 US+ for a seperate sound card. Onboard sound these days is usually great. Unless you want to squeeze a handful more FPS out of your system. If so, the previously recommended Auzen X-Fi Forte 7.1 or the new X-Fi Home Theatre HD are my choices. They both use the same best-for-gaming Creative 20K2 PCI Express chipset as the top Creative X-Fi cards do, but are built with higher quality components than Creative cards are. Their Windows drivers are also less bloated than Creative's are.
One issue with these Auzen cards, though, if you use Linux. It does not have (and apparently won't have) any Linux drivers and no one else is making them for it. The Creative "XFiDrv_Linux_Public_US_1.00.tar.gz" driver does not recognize the Auzen cards, but works fine with Creative cards. If you use Windows, though, no problems with the Auzen cards.
Auzentech drivers are less bloated than Creatives are but the fact remains that they are from Creative in their vital parts, so you buy the awesome Creative fail with your expensive Auzentech Card with higher quality components but still get the popping issues because of junk drivers :P (it doesnt apply to everybody, many the cards work without problems but the % they dont is alot higher than for other products)
If you are using Vista you sometimes will get the memory bug, which causes Windows own audiodg.exe to eat up memory till your PC crashes or till you net stop and restart it...
The creative Support cant help you because they just deny that such a problem exists for anybody else, even though you can read it in their forums or google it :P
I would never ever buy a Creative Soundcard (or anything that uses their drivers/software) again, the quality of the cards are fine the problem is purely on the Software side, which they obviously dont want to get under control.
If you dont mind the inferior quality of Onboard Soundcards stay with it or buy Asus Xonar Card, or if you dont mind having a fat chance of driver failure go with Creative...(or Auzentechs X-FI Cards for that matter)
Auzentech drivers are less bloated than Creatives are but the fact remains that they are from Creative in their vital parts, so you buy the awesome Creative fail with your expensive Auzentech Card with higher quality components but still get the popping issues because of junk drivers :P (it doesnt apply to everybody, many the cards work without problems but the % they dont is alot higher than for other products)
If you are using Vista you sometimes will get the memory bug, which causes Windows own audiodg.exe to eat up memory till your PC crashes or till you net stop and restart it...
The creative Support cant help you because they just deny that such a problem exists for anybody else, even though you can read it in their forums or google it :P
I would never ever buy a Creative Soundcard (or anything that uses their drivers/software) again, the quality of the cards are fine the problem is purely on the Software side, which they obviously dont want to get under control.
If you dont mind the inferior quality of Onboard Soundcards stay with it or buy Asus Xonar Card, or if you dont mind having a fat chance of driver failure go with Creative...(or Auzentechs X-FI Cards for that matter)
The "popping issue" only occurs with the first generation EMU20K1 chip (on cards which use the PCI connection). And it was not a driver issue, it was a hardware issue. Which is why I recommended the two Auzen cards with the second generation EMU20K2 chip (on cards which use the PCI-Express connection).
The Auzen Windows drivers--in addition to being less bloated--suffer from potentially none of the same issues that Creative drivers do. They are heavily modified and rewritten.
Something I forgot...the advantages of Creative's full hardware processing of 3-D (and other) audio is normally only significant on Windows XP. Vista removes the hardware abstraction layer for DirectSound. In Vista, only games that support third-party APIs--such as "OpenAL"--will support hardware processing. Which WoW does not.
Then again, Creative (and Auzen) have released software called "Alchemy" which converts EAX sound (used by those cards and used by WoW) into OpenAL. Which means that Creative chips & WoW can again take advantage of hardware processing in Windows Vista. And that processing--which the Xonar cards cannot do as they handle EAX/OpenAL/etc. in software--can potentially lead to FPS advantages. But it becomes less and less significant with the increasing power of today's CPUs.
I'm not the world's biggest fan of Creative--starting back in the days of the AWE32 sound cards which used a proprietary wavetable solution instead of the industry standard General MIDI (GM). Consequently, you couldn't get most games of the day to play GM sound on it (as you could with cards that gave you true GM, such as the Yamaha Waveforce XG). Icky...especially with one of my all time favorite games Wing Commander: Privateer :) (which supported GM).
If you have specialized high fidelity music requirements (contrary to what you say, a lot of onboard sound is just fine for both gaming & music for most people), the Asus Xonar series is great. Usually acknowledged in tests I've seen to be superior to Creative-brand cards (and onboard sound) for music fidelity. And with better drivers than Creative (but not necessarily better than Auzen's). Many Xonar models are very reasonably priced too.
But as I previously implied, if your sound needs are not top-end and want to best utilize limited money, there are more effective options for the money than a discrete sound card (i.e. a faster CPU, etc.).
The "popping issue" only occurs with the first generation EMU20K1 chip (on cards which use the PCI connection). And it was not a driver issue, it was a hardware issue. Which is why I recommended the two Auzen cards with the second generation EMU20K2 chip (on cards which use the PCI-Express connection).
The Auzen Windows drivers--in addition to being less bloated--suffer from potentially none of the same issues that Creative drivers do. They are heavily modified and rewritten.
Something I forgot...the advantages of Creative's full hardware processing of 3-D (and other) audio is normally only significant on Windows XP. Vista removes the hardware abstraction layer for DirectSound. In Vista, only games that support third-party APIs--such as "OpenAL"--will support hardware processing. Which WoW does not.
Then again, Creative (and Auzen) have released software called "Alchemy" which converts EAX sound (used by those cards and used by WoW) into OpenAL. Which means that Creative chips & WoW can again take advantage of hardware processing in Windows Vista. And that processing--which the Xonar cards cannot do as they handle EAX/OpenAL/etc. in software--can potentially lead to FPS advantages. But it becomes less and less significant with the increasing power of today's CPUs.
I'm not the world's biggest fan of Creative--starting back in the days of the AWE32 sound cards which used a proprietary wavetable solution instead of the industry standard General MIDI (GM). Consequently, you couldn't get most games of the day to play GM sound on it (as you could with cards that gave you true GM, such as the Yamaha Waveforce XG). Icky...especially with one of my all time favorite games Wing Commander: Privateer :) (which supported GM).
If you have specialized high fidelity music requirements (contrary to what you say, a lot of onboard sound is just fine for both gaming & music for most people), the Asus Xonar series is great. Usually acknowledged in tests I've seen to be superior to Creative-brand cards (and onboard sound) for music fidelity. And with better drivers than Creative (but not necessarily better than Auzen's). Many Xonar models are very reasonably priced too.
But as I previously implied, if your sound needs are not top-end and want to best utilize limited money, there are more effective options for the money than a discrete sound card (i.e. a faster CPU, etc.).
Thats why me and hundreds of other people have the popping issues with PCI Express cards ;)
And the Auzentech drivers are as far as I know in their vital parts not different to the creative ones. You can even modify the creative Windows drivers to work on the Auzentechs
Basically the only thing that makes me keep the Creative Card is their totally superior Upmixing of Stereo Sources for 5.1 Systems and because iam a cheapass and dont want to buy another Soundcard because my onboard sound sucks ass. (and because I hope the problems vanish with Windows 7)
Thats why me and hundreds of other people have the popping issues with PCI Express cards ;)
And the Auzentech drivers are as far as I know in their vital parts not different to the creative ones. You can even modify the creative Windows drivers to work on the Auzentechs
Eh, last time I researched it heavily (i.e. the beginning of this year), only the EMU20K1 chip/PCI interface cards had well known potential "popping" issues with various hardware...with various ways of working around it. All involving hardware; such as replacing the capacitors on the card (giggle), moving the card to a different PCI slot, changing the PCI latency, etc.. The first generation of the X-Fi cards has acknowledged PCI bus issues on various hardware, just as PCI Creative Live! cards did long ago. Which is lame, for sure.
With the EMU20K2 chip + PCI-Express, I saw none of these "popping" issues being reported anywhere earlier this year. That may have changed in the past few months if what you say is the case. Or people are not reporting things properly...which is likely.
Of course the Auzen drivers have a lot of the same "core" as the Creative ones do...they both are manipulating a lot of the same hardware. But there are a lot of differences as well.
In any case, you have your recommendations, I have mine ;).
Well maybe popping is the wrong description crackling sounds more like it atleast :D
And the problem exists basically since the X-Fi Titanium's exist you can read dozens of people complaining on creative Forums in their cracke/pop threads ;)
And dont get me wrong Auzentech builds great Soundcards, but mixing in Creative Software failure inside their cards doesnt really help the quality :P
Sure, the sound subsystem won't have much of an effect on things whether or not its offloaded. If you checkmark "Use Hardware" in the Sound settings, its not offloaded at all (see below).
That may not be true either. Checking "Use Hardware" offloads effects processing onto the sound card driver, which can in turn either pass it to the sound card or use the CPU to do it (depending on the driver and sound hardware). In the case that the sound card driver is doing effects processing on the CPU, it may still be able to do it on a separate core than WoW's main thread(s).
Even if WoW does not use multiple cores, there's an advantage when you're running any other program in the background.
Indeed. I highly recommend a dual-core setup so that the OS and background apps can use a separate core from whatever CPU-intensive games/apps you want to run in the foreground. Not only does it reduce slowdowns, but it also keeps the OS responsive if a program freezes and is using 100% of the CPU so that you can kill it instead of rebooting.
Auzentech drivers are less bloated than Creatives are but the fact remains that they are from Creative in their vital parts, so you buy the awesome Creative fail with your expensive Auzentech Card with higher quality components but still get the popping issues because of junk drivers :P (it doesnt apply to everybody, many the cards work without problems but the % they dont is alot higher than for other products)
If you are using Vista you sometimes will get the memory bug, which causes Windows own audiodg.exe to eat up memory till your PC crashes or till you net stop and restart it...
The creative Support cant help you because they just deny that such a problem exists for anybody else, even though you can read it in their forums or google it :P
I would never ever buy a Creative Soundcard (or anything that uses their drivers/software) again, the quality of the cards are fine the problem is purely on the Software side, which they obviously dont want to get under control.
I was excited about Auzentech at first, but once they made their "deal with the devil" (Creative) I lost interest.
If you dont mind the inferior quality of Onboard Soundcards stay with it or buy Asus Xonar Card, or if you dont mind having a fat chance of driver failure go with Creative...(or Auzentechs X-FI Cards for that matter)
If your on-board sound is from Realtek then don't bother buying an external sound card unless you have surround sound issues in Vista/Win7. Realtek has decent hardware and they offer regularly updated reference drivers from their web site.
I bought an Asus Xonar DX card for my old desktop just before I upgraded to a laptop as my main WoW machine, and it's great. Their hardware, firmware and drivers support EVERYTHING (EAX, DirectSound3D, OpenAL, DDL/DTS realtime 5.1 digital encoding, etc. - well, maybe not ASIO I guess). I can't wait until I build another desktop gaming machine to put that card into. My only complaint is that it seemed to prevent my motherboard's (an Asus mobo ironically) second SATA controller from working properly for some reason.
That may not be true either. Checking "Use Hardware" offloads effects processing onto the sound card driver, which can in turn either pass it to the sound card or use the CPU to do it (depending on the driver and sound hardware). In the case that the sound card driver is doing effects processing on the CPU, it may still be able to do it on a separate core than WoW's main thread(s).
Regardless of how much processing the sound driver/system CPU does vs. primarily sound hardware, there always be some the driver does (translating the processed sound, etc.). But sure...it might be interesting to find out if non-multicore sound drivers can do their work (whatever amount of work it is depending on the processing the sound chip does) in a separate core from WoW when "Use hardware" is checked.
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You looking to slap something together at home, Elsia? Or prefer something pre-assembled? And desktop or laptop?
Before knowing, a quick video recommendation. You don't really need a video card in the Nvidia GTX260/ATI 4870 (or better) power territory to run WoW well at high detail/resolution. Something in the Nvidia 8800 (or better) territory would work fine, while costing less (I've verified doing tech support for friends who play WoW).
Anyway, if I could get some info about the above, can provide some more detailed recommendations :).
GTX 260-216 was recommended because it's currently on a price drop in Germany. Also if I upgrade I don't want to upgrade again when the next WoW erxpansion comes out, so I'm not gonna plan for the bare minimum.
I have a chassis and all the periphery is fine. I don't want to dump my case (tower) just to replace motherboard/cpu/gpu/mem. I already have gone through a mobo and gpu replacement thanks to both having fried out at some point. Buying a complete PC is a waste of a few 100 bucks. I'm happy to assemble as needed.
If I had a choice I'd just upgrade the CPU and see how much that helped, but I have an obsolete socket (959) board, so virtually any upgrade that promises to have some longevity means a motherboard/ram upgrade anyway.
But frankly I still think my current system should hack Wow and it does look somewhat better since 3.1 but still hadn't had a chance to raid. I am not going to upgrade now if my system remains sensibly playable. I'm scheduled to update in fall, which for many reasons will be logistically easier for me to pull off.
If it's mainly for WoW I'd personally go for the Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 any multi-core gains you would have got from the Q8200 should easily be made up by the much faster clockspeed on the E8400 and you don't have to rely on multi-threading for your performance.
As for Ulduar seems much better than Naxx performance wise, don't seem to be dropping below 30 FPS and I'm running 1680x1050 res with full max settings other than shadows, with 8x multi-sampling. I'm running the E6850 which should be a bit slower than the processor I recommended to you.
OK. Good choice actually...as long as your system can hack it in 3.1 (hopefully), no need to spend the moola on something new.
As you probably know, going AMD (as you currently have) will save money nearly all of the time over going Intel. The only reason I went with the Intel i7 here is I wanted to get near the top end (and I had to pay through the nose for the motherboard & memory...sobs quietly). Top end is not needed for WoW.
If you do buy something in the fall, recommendations will change from now, of course. You said "Socket 959"; did you mean Socket 939? Yep, that's an outdated socket :). The good news is that the current AMD motherboards in the "sweet spot" of value--Sockets "AM2" and "AM2+"--are reasonably priced.
The top current AMD motherboards use Socket "AM3" (it was just released recently); the only real advantage of which allows the use of overpriced DDR3 memory instead of perfectly adequate DDR2 that the earlier sockets use. Also, the AM3 motherboards can't use a lot of the current AMD CPUs (they use a different pin-out, among other things), so the CPUs and motherboard choices are going to be a lot more limited.
So a decent AM2+ motherboard is an inexpensive, decent choice. The AM2+ has a faster "HyperTransport" controller & can produce potentially more power savings over the regular AM2. One thing: an AMD CPU that can fit in an AM2 socket can also be used with an AM2+ socket. But...the two AM2+ differences above (among others) will not be utilized if you use a CPU designed for the AM2. It will function just like an AM2 board.
So if you get an AM2+ board, best to look for a CPU designed for it. Fortunately again, such CPUs generally don't command a major price premium over the older AM2 CPUs.
As to manufacturer, I always recommend going with a "big" brand name over the lowest of the low end. Not necessarily because of engineering or build quality on the board itself (though there often are differences), but because of the BIOS quality. Quality BIOSes, frequently updated (if needed) are always a good sign. Nearly all manufacturers use a "core" BIOS from a company such as AMI or Phoenix, then add code tailored to each motherboard. Its this tailoring that some companies get right (and updated) and some do not.
Suggestions, starting at lowest price & going up for each manufacturer. A whopping load of AMD motherboards have integrated video chips, some of which are not half bad. But most/all I've seen don't compare to discrete video cards. All "AMD 790GX" boards (none listed below) have integrated video:
--Gigabyte (I'm a big fan of their "Ultra Durable" boards, which they have throughout their product lines):
-GA-MA770-UD3
-GA-MA790X-UD4P
-GA-MA790FX-UD5P
--Asus
-M3A78
-M3A32-MVP Deluxe
-M4A79 Deluxe
--MSI
-K9A2 Neo2
-K9A2 CF
-K9A2 Platinum V2
Other reputable manufacturers as well, like "ASRock" (Asus's wholly owned low-priced-product subsidiary) & DFI.
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As to video cards, yes, the Nvidia GeForce GTX260-216 is an excellent choice. It has the "GT200" chip, currently the top of the Nvidia line.
Lower priced & somewhat slower, yet still great (from top to bottom):
--the recently released GTS250 (essentially a "rebadged" 9800 GTX+ at a potentially lower price, the former top of the earlier 9xxx line. Its the same chip)
--9800GT
As to ATI...am an old time IT/PC guy here. ATI is currently making really great hardware. But unfortunately, I wouldn't touch their drivers with a 10-foot piece of wet bacon (mmmm). Year after year, they have continued to produce drivers with often outrageous problems with both the OS they are running on and with applications. On average, they are way more buggy than Nvidia drivers have been historically. I thought things would improve when they were bought by AMD, but it hasn't seemed like it.
Also ATI's driver control panel on Windows requires separate installation of Microsoft's .NET framework. 200 MB+ of bloat that few applications these days use. Many PCs have it already installed though. Vista includes it but XP does not, you have to get it separately for XP. In many circles (including the work environment here), using the .NET framework implies that you don't have the programming competence to write a solid C program without help :D.
Nvidia's drivers don't require .NET. In the end, its the driver history which makes me recommend Nvidia.
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For audio, no real need to spend $100 US+ for a seperate sound card. Onboard sound these days is usually great. Unless you want to squeeze a handful more FPS out of your system. If so, the previously recommended Auzen X-Fi Forte 7.1 or the new X-Fi Home Theatre HD are my choices. They both use the same best-for-gaming Creative 20K2 PCI Express chipset as the top Creative X-Fi cards do, but are built with higher quality components than Creative cards are. Their Windows drivers are also less bloated than Creative's are.
One issue with these Auzen cards, though, if you use Linux. It does not have (and apparently won't have) any Linux drivers and no one else is making them for it. The Creative "XFiDrv_Linux_Public_US_1.00.tar.gz" driver does not recognize the Auzen cards, but works fine with Creative cards. If you use Windows, though, no problems with the Auzen cards.
Good luck :).
If you are using Vista you sometimes will get the memory bug, which causes Windows own audiodg.exe to eat up memory till your PC crashes or till you net stop and restart it...
The creative Support cant help you because they just deny that such a problem exists for anybody else, even though you can read it in their forums or google it :P
I would never ever buy a Creative Soundcard (or anything that uses their drivers/software) again, the quality of the cards are fine the problem is purely on the Software side, which they obviously dont want to get under control.
If you dont mind the inferior quality of Onboard Soundcards stay with it or buy Asus Xonar Card, or if you dont mind having a fat chance of driver failure go with Creative...(or Auzentechs X-FI Cards for that matter)
The "popping issue" only occurs with the first generation EMU20K1 chip (on cards which use the PCI connection). And it was not a driver issue, it was a hardware issue. Which is why I recommended the two Auzen cards with the second generation EMU20K2 chip (on cards which use the PCI-Express connection).
The Auzen Windows drivers--in addition to being less bloated--suffer from potentially none of the same issues that Creative drivers do. They are heavily modified and rewritten.
Something I forgot...the advantages of Creative's full hardware processing of 3-D (and other) audio is normally only significant on Windows XP. Vista removes the hardware abstraction layer for DirectSound. In Vista, only games that support third-party APIs--such as "OpenAL"--will support hardware processing. Which WoW does not.
Then again, Creative (and Auzen) have released software called "Alchemy" which converts EAX sound (used by those cards and used by WoW) into OpenAL. Which means that Creative chips & WoW can again take advantage of hardware processing in Windows Vista. And that processing--which the Xonar cards cannot do as they handle EAX/OpenAL/etc. in software--can potentially lead to FPS advantages. But it becomes less and less significant with the increasing power of today's CPUs.
I'm not the world's biggest fan of Creative--starting back in the days of the AWE32 sound cards which used a proprietary wavetable solution instead of the industry standard General MIDI (GM). Consequently, you couldn't get most games of the day to play GM sound on it (as you could with cards that gave you true GM, such as the Yamaha Waveforce XG). Icky...especially with one of my all time favorite games Wing Commander: Privateer :) (which supported GM).
If you have specialized high fidelity music requirements (contrary to what you say, a lot of onboard sound is just fine for both gaming & music for most people), the Asus Xonar series is great. Usually acknowledged in tests I've seen to be superior to Creative-brand cards (and onboard sound) for music fidelity. And with better drivers than Creative (but not necessarily better than Auzen's). Many Xonar models are very reasonably priced too.
But as I previously implied, if your sound needs are not top-end and want to best utilize limited money, there are more effective options for the money than a discrete sound card (i.e. a faster CPU, etc.).
Thats why me and hundreds of other people have the popping issues with PCI Express cards ;)
And the Auzentech drivers are as far as I know in their vital parts not different to the creative ones. You can even modify the creative Windows drivers to work on the Auzentechs
Basically the only thing that makes me keep the Creative Card is their totally superior Upmixing of Stereo Sources for 5.1 Systems and because iam a cheapass and dont want to buy another Soundcard because my onboard sound sucks ass. (and because I hope the problems vanish with Windows 7)
Eh, last time I researched it heavily (i.e. the beginning of this year), only the EMU20K1 chip/PCI interface cards had well known potential "popping" issues with various hardware...with various ways of working around it. All involving hardware; such as replacing the capacitors on the card (giggle), moving the card to a different PCI slot, changing the PCI latency, etc.. The first generation of the X-Fi cards has acknowledged PCI bus issues on various hardware, just as PCI Creative Live! cards did long ago. Which is lame, for sure.
With the EMU20K2 chip + PCI-Express, I saw none of these "popping" issues being reported anywhere earlier this year. That may have changed in the past few months if what you say is the case. Or people are not reporting things properly...which is likely.
Of course the Auzen drivers have a lot of the same "core" as the Creative ones do...they both are manipulating a lot of the same hardware. But there are a lot of differences as well.
In any case, you have your recommendations, I have mine ;).
And the problem exists basically since the X-Fi Titanium's exist you can read dozens of people complaining on creative Forums in their cracke/pop threads ;)
And dont get me wrong Auzentech builds great Soundcards, but mixing in Creative Software failure inside their cards doesnt really help the quality :P
:o screenshotted!
That may not be true either. Checking "Use Hardware" offloads effects processing onto the sound card driver, which can in turn either pass it to the sound card or use the CPU to do it (depending on the driver and sound hardware). In the case that the sound card driver is doing effects processing on the CPU, it may still be able to do it on a separate core than WoW's main thread(s).
Indeed. I highly recommend a dual-core setup so that the OS and background apps can use a separate core from whatever CPU-intensive games/apps you want to run in the foreground. Not only does it reduce slowdowns, but it also keeps the OS responsive if a program freezes and is using 100% of the CPU so that you can kill it instead of rebooting.
I was excited about Auzentech at first, but once they made their "deal with the devil" (Creative) I lost interest.
If your on-board sound is from Realtek then don't bother buying an external sound card unless you have surround sound issues in Vista/Win7. Realtek has decent hardware and they offer regularly updated reference drivers from their web site.
I bought an Asus Xonar DX card for my old desktop just before I upgraded to a laptop as my main WoW machine, and it's great. Their hardware, firmware and drivers support EVERYTHING (EAX, DirectSound3D, OpenAL, DDL/DTS realtime 5.1 digital encoding, etc. - well, maybe not ASIO I guess). I can't wait until I build another desktop gaming machine to put that card into. My only complaint is that it seemed to prevent my motherboard's (an Asus mobo ironically) second SATA controller from working properly for some reason.
I wasn't talking "offloading" i general, I was referencing the offloading of sound processing onto another CPU core in the paragraph that quote came from.
Regardless of how much processing the sound driver/system CPU does vs. primarily sound hardware, there always be some the driver does (translating the processed sound, etc.). But sure...it might be interesting to find out if non-multicore sound drivers can do their work (whatever amount of work it is depending on the processing the sound chip does) in a separate core from WoW when "Use hardware" is checked.