PC Perspective - Creative Labs speaks up on the X-Fi and nForce 4 issue

Creative Labs speaks up on the X-Fi and nForce 4 issue

Thu, Nov 10, 2005 - 04:28 PM

Jonathan Hung | Source: PC Perspective | Subject: General Tech

Since publishing our review of the X-Fi sound card, i've heard about incompatibilities with the X-Fi and certain nForce 4 motherboards. There are various symptoms including a non-booting system or unidentified PCI devices.

If you're one of the few customers suffering from this problem you can either wait for a BIOS update from your motherboard manufacturer or ship your X-Fi back to Creative Labs to have the EEPROM replaced (which is something the user can not do themselves).

It's important to note that Creative Labs has been shipping X-Fi packages with updated EEPROMs that has this problem fixed. There is good chance that the X-Fi card you buy today will work fine with your nForce 4 system, but keep this issue in mind when turning your X-Fi on for the first time.

I've asked Creative Labs about the issue and they came back with the following response which they have allowed us to reproduce here.

Please visit our Audio forum for assistance and more information. This thread in the Creative Labs forum has a lot of detail from users who are trying to get their X-Fi products to work.

We understand that, in rare instances, some users have experienced PC system incompatibility issues when installing Sound Blaster X-Fi sound cards with 2MB of cache (Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic and Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum) on nForce4 chipset motherboards. We've determined that the cause of this incompatibility is an issue in the motherboard's BIOS, relating to its PCI enumeration of devices with 2MB or less of cache memory.

In the vast majority of cases, this incompatibility can be resolved by performing a system BIOS update, which can be obtained via the motherboard manufacturer's website. In the rare cases when a BIOS update fails to address the issue, users can contact Creative's technical support to exchange their X-Fi sound card for one with updated EEPROM settings. An exchange is necessary as the EEPROM settings are not user upgradable.

1 Comments - Post Your Own Comment

Posted By aldamon

Fri, Nov 11, 2005 - 07:56 AM

Please correct the article. There is no reason to paraphrase the issue when a full, correct description of the problem is available from Creative: http://dmzweb4.europe.creative.com/SRVS/CGI-BIN/WEBCGI.EXE/,/?St=770,E=0000000000084793250,K=4798,Sxi=2,Case=obj(8572),Kb=ww_english_add,VARSET=ws:http://us.creative.com/ Solution ID # 8572 X-Fi Installation Difficulties Some computers may exhibit one or more of the following symptoms while attempting to install a Creative X-Fi sound card: System will either freeze or not boot System will say there are multiple unknown PCI Devices and then cause the system to generate a blue screen error. System may reboot repeatedly depending on XP settings. Error: The BIOS in this system is not fully ACPI compliant. Please contact your system vendor... ( STOP: 0x000000A5 ) These symptoms may be corrected with an updated BIOS from the motherboard manufacturer. To update the BIOS for your motherboard, please contact your motherboard vendor. If an updated BIOS is not available for your specific motherboard, please contact Customer Support for further assistance. When contacting Customer Support, please have your motherboard model and BIOS version available to give to the Customer Support advisor.

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