Abit has issued their latest FAQ dealing with crackling noises on Soundblaster Live! cards and corrupted data transfer using their VIA based motherboard range. They recommend altering BIOS settings as well as 3rd party PCI Latency patch by programmer George E. Breese. Quote: You may meet the following situations: Copying files from Iomega PEERLESS MEDIA drive to on-board IDE hard disk may lead the computer hangs, or the files may be corrupted. Creative Sound Blaster Live! (5.1) Series sound cards have a crackling noise while playing music with AT7 / KT7 / KT7-RAID / KT7A / KT7A-RAID / KR7A / KR7A-RAID / KR7A-133 / KR7A-133R / KX7-333 / KX7-333R motherboards. It is very slow to copy files from on-board IDE hard disk to another disk, the data may be corrupted, even leads the computer to be halted. Read more... Firstly, we suggest you download the latest driver for the devices, and install it. If it still can?t help, please try the next step. Adjust those three setting in BIOS menu: PCI Master Read Caching / PCI Delay Transaction / PCI Master Bus Time-Out. The recommended value is Disabled / Disabled / 0. However, there are too many hardware vendors and devices that we can?t guarantee the value would exactly meet your situation. Please try some other values if ?Disabled / Disabled / 0? doesn?t help. Using VIA PCI Latency patch may lead to the same result. Many users reported that the issue is solved after applying this patch. You may download the patch here. Please note that the patch is NOT officially released by VIA tech. It was released from a programmer, George E. Breese. The patch is for Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, and XP. Kudos to George for helping out the community with his great tool. Seems like he finally gets some recognition...