i recently purchased a creative sblive 5.1 card but hooked it up with creative inspire 4400 4.1 speakers. when enabling eax 2.0 in farcry i am experiencing a lag between like when i shoot a gun and when i hear the sound of the bullets. im new to using a soundcard. so can some1 help me and do i need any seperate updates for the usage of eax 2.0.

EAX puts quite a strain on your system. If it is not good enough to handle it this may be the cause of the lag. Matt matt@bbcomputing.co.uk www.bbcomputing.co.uk

I have the same card, but I use the speakers that cam with it, although it doesn't sound like your problem is speaker related. Download the latest driver for the card, then mess with the equaliser settings and such (you can find the shortcut to them in your startmenu>programs). Set up the distance for where your speakers are, and make the creative control panel is on the default setting. dont mess with all the EAX modes. Next, go to control panel>Sounds and audio devices, and make sure windows has the correct speaker setup, you can see the correct one on the little image of a computer monitor and some speakers. (ie, you want 5.1 surround, windows default is only stereo). Next, download the latest directx. And Finally, the latest patch for Far Cry. That should get you all sorted. Bare in mind the card isn't brilliant though, it will stall if you push it too far! AMD Athlon XP 1.8GHz 512MB RAM 120GB HDD SATA 12GB HDD IDE GeForce 4 Ti4600 w/ 128MB RAM Pioneer DVD/RW SB Live! 5.1 ABIT NF-7S Motherboard