I have used my X-Fi in 2 different computer setup's and I have never ran into this problem.
I'll list as much as I can of the parts of the 2 computers:
AMD Athlon 64 3700+ (Socket 754)
Gigabyte K8NS-Pro with nForce 3 250 Chipset
2 GB Ultra 400MHz PC3200 RAM (2x1GB DIMMs) (Not running Dual-Channel)
PNY Geforce 6800GT AGP8x
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300
Gigabyte GA-P965-S3 with Intel P965 Chipset
2 GB G.Skill DDR2 800MHz PC6400 RAM (2x1GB DIMMs) (Dual-Channel)
eVGA Geforce 7900 GT
I also setup a Media Center PC for my parents' house that has a X-Fi as well, with no problems. That is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200 on socket AM2 with an Asus M2N-E (nForce 570 Ultra chipset) and running 1GB of Dual Channel DDR2 RAM and an eVGA 7300 GT gfx card.
When I first bought the card a year and a half ago, I also ran it briefly in an nForce 4 board, to show my friends. It was an AMD, socket 939. I dont know what the motherboard exactly was but it was an Abit nForce 4 Ultra chipset running 1 GB of DDR in Dual Channel. I never heard this crackling in that setup either, and that was the drivers off the CD.
Back when I was considering getting mine, I too heard of this problem but I have never personally heard it in over a year of use. I have ran many MANY games on this card with zero negative effect.
And that article talking about using SO many resources with all the background processes running, I have never really noticed a decrease in speed because of those processes. With all the other processes running on the modern gaming PC, the X-Fi ones are the least of the issues.
Think about it, a gaming PC would have a VoIP program, Ventrilo or TeamSpeak, and Fraps and possibly some IM program, yahoo/AIM/MSN, or something running on top of whatever game they are playing. All of these use more processor power then I have ever seen my X-Fi ones use. And in today's modern computers, they are all dual-core (or even quad-core for the high end). I have never seen a single game be able to use ALL of both (or all 4) cores for any extended period of time, that means you have extra CPU time available so you really wouldnt see a significant decrease in performance because a few processes use up to 5% of ONE of the core's for a split second.
On top of all of that, if you run an on-board sound card or a software sound setting in your games, chances are somewhere between 5-15% of what CPU time the game is using is to process sound. I have even seen gains of upward of 20% CPU time freed up when I disabled sound, when I am running a computer w/o an X-Fi that is. If you move that to a sound card, you re-gain that 5-15% CPU Time.
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