Soundcard Messed up, fixes/replacement?

[Hicks12]

Right have a creative X-FI fatal1ty xtreme gamer and its been solid since ive had it (over a year now bought off here!), was using it last night while watching some videos and then when i got up today and switched it on ive encountered an extremely odd issue...

My windows devices now look like this:


As you can see it has a random PCB icon, this wasnt the case before as it was simply a speaker icon and was name speakers or something... not sure why its internal aux at all! And it was disable when i looked at it, and the same goes for my microphone it says "What U Hear" instead of microphone but when i first booted today it said internal AUX, only changed to what u hear after multiple reboots .

Now this is extremely annoying as i cant pinpoint WHY its done this, it was working fine 100% last night. The Icing on the cake though is that i thought id fall back on to my realtek onboard sound just in the mean time... that hasnt worked at all, its enabled and everything but all i get from the rear output is a reasonably loud beeeeee or buzzing, i try and send test tones to the device and it shows a signal being sent/played but i hear nothing bar that static, ive tried multiple headsets still not change and even the microphone doesnt work onboard! I swear it worked beforehand, ive reinstalled drivers and its still not fixing the issue!.


The only thing that is working still is my GTX460 hdmi output to the av receiver, works fine . Anyone have an idea as to why this has happened or potential steps to resolving this? I cant go to a systems backup as well that is a very old one, systems backup was planned to be setup a few days from now when i had time . Im currently redownloading the creative drivers but its an hour left from creatives website >.<.

Also as im siding to a hardware fault as its so sudden with no installations/changes that i recall last night. What soundcard would be a good replacement? Needs a good microphone port and a solid audio output, id ideally like to be able to connect it to my av receiver aswell as a standard 3.5mm if possible. Budget is about £100 if its a solid and reliable card without crap drivers!.

[kalniel]

Try reseating the card or trying another slot, and replugging any cables - might be hardware, but worth checking connection and IRQ conflicts first.

In some ways if you liked the X-fi then the best replacement is just a newer one. Otherwise I'd recommend the Xonar range of cards - the drivers aren't perfect, but they're a lot better than the creative ones, and there's less of an 'it's old so we won't support it' attitude. So something like the D2:
http://www.scan.co.uk/products/asus-...pci-sound-card

Or D2x (same thing but with PCI-PCI-E bridge so needs a PCI-E slot instead).

[Hicks12]

thanks kalniel, for some reason i thought i only had 1 pci port available (other one blocked) but checked and thankfully it isnt now and managed to slot it in, works fine on this slot... maybe the other slot has died or something , will have to try it in the other one at some point but reseating it in the same one didnt fix it.

Still curious as to why my onboard sound isnt working correctly, stupid thing!.

[GoNz0]

probably a driver issue, works fine on a new IRQ so u know its not the card.

[kalniel]

For the onboard also check case header connections/cables. If you've plugged it up so that the case front outputs go to onboard then these could be lose, could be shorting, or could even be broken (they do break quite easily). Also check for shorts on the back panel.