Since it's introduction there have been a lot of people reporting crackling and popping caused by their SoundBlaster X-Fi making games unplayable. In an effort to fix this problem Creative released a new X-Fi driver (beta) and wrote a technical analysis. If both failed, which still seems to be the case for many X-Fi owners, here is a new update straight from Creative. According to Creative only approximately 0.03% of the users are affected from which only 0.01% reported the issues. Overall Creative believes a Motherboard BIOS update will fix the crackling and popping and they are still working on that with nVidia and other motherboard/chipset manufacturers.

If there is no BIOS update available for your motherboard yet there might be other ways to fix the problem which are listed below.

X-Fi Zone