[slavcho]

Abit An8 32x
Athlon FX-55 not oc'ed
2gig OCZ platinum. Dual Channel
2 x geforce 7900's SLI
PC Power and Cooling S75CF 750W EPS12V SLI Certified
Creative X-Fi platinum PCI
WinXP home SP2
Logitech 5.1 speakers
WD Cavier 350 IDE

All drivers updated

Purchased an X-Fi Platinum about a year ago. Loved it, not a single issue.

However

Weird sound stuttering/delay starting going on in this rig about 3 months ago. Games seemed fine like COD 4. However some windows apps like Spider solitaire, outlook and other applications would have a sound delay.
Got progressively worse with music and video sound starting to skip.

I tried everything to solve this. Couldn’t find any IRQ conflicts. Ran Sandra and a couple of other apps to see if anything weird came up. Nothing.

Started to worry about my beautiful PSU crapping out on me.

Decided to just reformat and do a clean OS install and see what happens.
I was running to WD raptors in Raid 0. When the OS didn’t install I ran some WD drive tests and one of my raptors crapped.

Decided to just install on my IDE drive. Everything went fine. Sound problem was gone. I assumed it was the one raptor causing the issue.

A week ago the same thing started. However this time game sounds started going on and off. I tried different XFi drivers including the new Beta that’s out, I used Driver Cleaner before I changed drivers. Didn’t solve it.

I just reformatted and reinstalled the OS again. Sound is perfect with the latest drivers. However I decided not to install SP3 and leave it at SP2.

I’m going to keep a log with date and time every time I install any application, update anything or change a setting.

Anyone see a red flag here please post.