Question Question about 2 sound blaster solutions.

[Maramsp]

Hey all.

I have now for a few months, the soundblaster x-ae5 plus. And while the sound is, obviously, amazing. I cannot get rid of the problem that the sound sometimes swap the channels.
Always the center speaker is affected and get swapped to other channels.

Read online that it can be solved by updating to the latest mobo drivers, and I did that (asus rog strix b550 wifi 2) as well by upting bios, chipset drivers, and so on.
Problem still persists unfortunally.

So i did some more research and found out that it is cause of the mobo only has pcie 4.0 interface, and the card is pcie 1.2, so because the difference is that huge, this problem can comes on. It can be solved by switching the pci lanes in the bios from 4.0 to 3.0, but i dont wanna tinker with that honestly. Not because i think i will lose that much speed for my gpu, but simply because i dont know what to do in the bios to achieve it.
And still, "will" it give me the solution i was hoping for? Im not sure...

So, i thought of going to the onboard sound from the b550 wifi 2, but while the board has an optical out to connect my home cinema setup, it doesnt support 5.1 sound through it, without me paying for some app like dts x or whatever the name is called. So, i gave up on that.

Now while the card cannot be returned anymore cause the 30 day return period is already done, there is still another solution, which is buying a creative card that is connected via usb 2.0, and my b550 does have 2 usb 2.0 ports.

So i was thinking about either the soundblaster X G3, X G6, or the sound blaster GC7.
All 3 have an usb connection, but seemingly the G3 only has an optical in, so most likely it will be the G6 or the G7 depending on the answer of the following question:

My AE5 plus does have some awesome RGB lightning, both on the card, and a light strip, which i would prefer to have inside my case, alongside the sound thats coming out of the usb sound blaster.

So is it possible to have the drivers installed for both the internal ae5 plus, AND the drivers for the G6 or G7, while then having the lightning active on the AE5 plus, but the sound then set in win11 coming out of the G6 or GC7, obviously connected to my edifier S760D 5.1 set?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers from M----- [Moderator edit to remove possible personally identifying information,]

ps. Im also going to look how to move back from pci4.0 to 3.0, and see what the difference is. This post is merely meant for some information. Still not sure what im gonna do.

 

[Lutfij]

1| Did you clear the CMOS after verifying that you'd updated the BIOS successfully?
2| I wouldn't use two sound cards on a setup with 5.1 audio. If you need the lighting, then perhaps take advantage of the RGB(x2) and ARGB(x1) headers on your motherboard.
3| After you'd updated the BIOS, how did you update the drivers? Did you manually uninstall your audio drivers and reinstalling the latest drivers sourced from Creative's support site in an elevated command?

 

[Maramsp]

1| Did you clear the CMOS after verifying that you'd updated the BIOS successfully?
2| I wouldn't use two sound cards on a setup with 5.1 audio. If you need the lighting, then perhaps take advantage of the RGB(x2) and ARGB(x1) headers on your motherboard.
3| After you'd updated the BIOS, how did you update the drivers? Did you manually uninstall your audio drivers and reinstalling the latest drivers sourced from Creative's support site in an elevated command?

1: it was the first thing i did after buying the whole computer setup, and yes, i did clear the cmos ofcourse.

2: Thing is, this light strip uses both a molex and a normal rgb connection thing. But i think the molex needs to be connected only so that the card can edit the lightning on the strip.

3: Ofcourse. Thats what i always do, besides the elevated command. I just ran the setup as an administrator. Should be the same i think?

In any case, even when switching the pci gen things in my bios, problem still exists, but it seems now less existant compared to when they were on auto.
So might have to go for that usb sound card then later i think. shame tho, since it costs me at least 120 euros more...