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Question about 2 sound blaster solutions.

Joined
Mar 23, 2024
Messages
41 (0.28/day)
Location
Almelo, Netherlands
System Name my system
Processor AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Motherboard Asus Rog strix b550 gaming wifi II
Cooling noctua nh-u12s se-am4
Memory corsair vengeance 32gb (2x16) 3600mhz
Video Card(s) Gigabyte RTX 2070 Windforce 8g (planning to upgrade to an asus TUF 4070 TI super soon)
Storage 1x 240gb kingston ssd (win) 1x500gb kingston m.2 1x1tb 870 evo ssd 2x1tb hdd (storage)
Display(s) gigabyte aorus cv27f
Case Sharkoon Rebel c50 RGB
Audio Device(s) Creative soundblaster x-ae5 plus
Power Supply Seasonic Focus GX-850 ATX 3.0
Mouse Logitech g502x
Keyboard Microsoft ernomic buisness
VR HMD none
Software win 11 64 bit home
Benchmark Scores To be tested, so none yet
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 Martijn Spiegelaar

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.
 
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