Problem with latency/lack of sound?

Hello all! I've tried googling the crap out of this and searching these forums high and low but alas I can't find a solution to my problem :/ Heres the deal...just built my first computer system the other day and was in tears of joy when it finally turned on because I've been waiting for a good computer for so long. Now I have said computer and want to get to some music production practice so I can record rough demos for my band. I'm using a Line6 Pod X3 live plugged into the line in on my soundcard (which is a Creative PCI Express X-Fi Xtreme Audio card). I've read that lowering the sample rate and buffers and what not helps to reduce latency at the cost of quality, however the lowest I can lower my samples/buffers is still not low enough to reduce latency, any lower than a sample of 512 makes no sound come out at all :s I've tried different combinations of samples and buffers and sample rates however I can't get it low enough to reduce latency, and too low equals no sound at all... I'm at the stage of pulling out my hair so any help you guys could offer would save me countless hours of hassle and having to buy a wig... Thanks in advance :D

I have a feeling you're not gonna get very far with that soundcard. It isn't really designed for low latency recording. Are you using its own asio drivers or asio4all? knowing creative, it's probably internally running at 48khz as well, so at the very least, try setting your project rate to 48khz.

Hmm fair enough...I guess I should have just stuck to the pod from the start. Dont fix it if it isn't broken and all that. Cheers for the advice, its much appreciated :)

I'm only a few months ahead of you on the building a system with the goal of recording thing, and I have a Line 6 Podxt, and have found it works perfectly fine as an interface, especially if you're main concern for now is getting ideas down.