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I'm looking to finally buy one after a year of using the Realtek HD that came with my Mobo. Nothing bad about the Realtek, it's done all that I've needed over the year. Thing is, I just got a pair of the "Creative Fatal1ty Professional Series Gaming Headset MKII" off Newegg's Shell Shocker for like $35 and free shipping as always. Anyways, was looking at the "X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series" but found out through reviews that the digital optical in/out (on the front I/O) is only 2 channels, not 5. I'm not using any optical connection at the moment, but will be when I move in a month or so. So naturally, I would need a sound card with 5.1 optical in/out support. Which leads me to the X-Fi Platinum and the questions.

1. Will it do 5 channels in/out through the digital optical?
2. Is it going to be replaced soon as I see Creative has discontinued it for quite some time now.
3. Is it worth it? Is the EAX 5.0, CMSS-3D, and all the other bells and whistles they have?

1. It should on the out, but a quick googling reveals people having problems with it. I'm not sure about the in.
2. The Fatal1ty/Titanium series was the replacement for the Platinum.
3. No. EAX 5 was only noticeable in BF2 and CMSS just tends to distort the sound (especially when it's in 'game' mode). There are better cards out now that have actual optical out without resorting to a front i/o panel (even some of the newer X-Fis have it on the card, not sure about the 2ch issue though). The Asus cards can also emulate some of the EAX 5 effects, though I can't speak to how good the reproductions are.

If you're going to just use optical out, would the Realtek not suffice?

Yeah, the Realtek would do just fine for the optical out, but I also need an optical in for my Xbox 360. And now that you mention it, I was thinking about looking at different cards from other companies. A little background story: I have an old Audigy 2 that was in my first computer about 7 years ago. I fell in love with the front I/O panel and used about every port. So I'm really looking for something that could possibly do MIDI, RCA input, and/or optical.

I suppose I'll look around for a bit and maybe wait to see what Creative has in the pipelines.

Newegg has the Creative PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series Sound Card on sale for $139.99 with promo code EMCYSZR59 until 5/20/2010.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 02021-LS1D

The newer titanium (pci-e) series are able to output more than 2.0 through digital. With the older series, you could buy a software upgrade with creative to enable 5.1 output.

As said, other cards are decent as well. If you want another chipset, then the asus sonar series are your best bet. If you want better quality components, auzentech should have something for you.

One of my friends has the X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty card and got it working pretty much perfectly on W7 64-bit Professional. He says that once he updated the drivers there were problems but was able to install it from the disk without such problems. Other users are also confirming that it works on Windows 7. And yet there's a whole ton of complaints about the drivers and many various problems.

I got a question on the X-Fi though. Is it able to "downmix" 5.1 input into, say, headphones for virtual surround? It seems that it's able to do this because it already has virtual surround features.

C-A_99 wrote:

I got a question on the X-Fi though. Is it able to "downmix" 5.1 input into, say, headphones for virtual surround? It seems that it's able to do this because it already has virtual surround features.

Yes, if you set it to 2-speaker/headphone mode. And it's actually pretty good at that.

One caveat, though: in the past, with my Audigy 2 ZS, selecting "headphones" was NOT the same as selecting "2 speakers". The headphones mode was horrible, it had some nasty auto-EQ going, but 2-channel mode was fine though. And I could hear everything "behind" me. I actually went back and forth with the Dolby sample clips trying out the card's downmixing vs. the Z-5500's downmixing, and the card did it better.

morphine wrote:

C-A_99 wrote:

I got a question on the X-Fi though. Is it able to "downmix" 5.1 input into, say, headphones for virtual surround? It seems that it's able to do this because it already has virtual surround features.

Yes, if you set it to 2-speaker/headphone mode. And it's actually pretty good at that.

And enable CMSS-3D for virtual surround.