It's about time.

Finally. With all my PCI slots used up, and my PCIe 1x screaming to be used, all I can say is thank you.

Process enhancements are usually applied incrementally to product lineups - I would expect the highest margin part (the Xfi Platinums and xTreme Gamers) to get the least attention in terms of cost efficiences because they are high margin, low volume product. The new PCIe card ia very high volume, lower margin product - it pays (a lot) to use a smaller fab process.

That said, I own an X-fi Platinum, and I love it, but I despise Creative and their bad software habits. (64 Hardware Voices in UT2004 is a 180MB download). Every piece of software Creative writes reminds me of WinMe, spiritually and literally.

That said, long live the PCIe transition. PCI cannot die soon enough. I am sick and tired of a 133MB/s cap across all devices. It renders all PCI hardware completely useless. Now if we could just get more chip makers to use HT for point-to-point on the mobo (reducing manufacturing costs for Motherboards and licensing costs for chip designers, while significantly increasing bandwidth, signaling speed and product compatibility) we'd all be rolling.

Too bad, Creative you will not get anything from me.

You should have released X-Fi in PCIe in round one. You have just screw over early adopters with countless problems in PCI version and people who want to move away from PCI.

Creative, you have been fighting an futile battle of reverence. Integrated audio is almost as good as your overpriced, proprietary crap. CPU overhead is almost non-existent. Average Joe and Gamer Kid doesn't care about super audio quality or all the marketing nonsense you throw at them.

The PCB itself seems quite "barren", perhaps they can trim it before the final release? Or is this the retail version?

I have a Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi XtremeMusic in one pc, and on the other I use the external version, called Creative Xmod. That external card is way smaller than the internal, I guess this trend continues..

Well, well, well. Look what we have here.

http://www.guru3d.com/newsitem.php?id=3005 (31 August 2005)

As far as PCI Express (PCIe) is concerned, which is the next bus, what we found is that the performance of PCIe is truly bad for audio. We are seeing four times degradation on the bus for audio.

PCIe is designed for graphics and high data transfer, but audio sends very small packets and the overhead can be very big! Moving the data across PCIe is much, much higher than PCI. So what we have to do is go back to the drawing board and work on the transport part of the chip and re-design it to add more silicon to overcome some of the problems we had with PCIe. So for us to come up with a PCIe solution is going to take a while because we have to overcome the problems we're facing with that bus.

Looks like they found a way to do it on PCI-E; we'll have to see if they did it well. Pity that most of us won't buy their product due to their starvation murdering of Aureal, patent warfare, bully tactics (Carmack's reverse), etc. We'll have to see if BlueGears, M-Audio, etc. can come out with something.

As good as integrated audio is getting, it's still not good enough for some of us. The integrated sound on my A8N-SLI Premium had some bizarre sound degradation in UT2004 that went away when I bought an X-Mystique. Ideally, sound should be on PCI-E, since it will have its own lane, and will be uninterrupted by other peripherals, unlike what would happen in the bad old days of VIA PCI bus latency bugs, and with running high-IO peripherals (RAID controllers) on the same bus as the soundcard.

Which brings me to another question that should've been asked earlier: why weren't there any gaming boards out there with TWO PCI buses, much like server boards have multiple PCI buses? You could separate high-IO or low-latency peripherals from the rest.

"...Considering that the X-Fi XtremeAudio is currently Creative's cheapest X-Fi sound card, it seems strange that the company would choose to show off a PCIe version of that particular card rather than, say, a PCIe X-Fi Fatal1ty."

Perhaps Creative's Management realizes that their X-Fi series is overpriced. They certainly aren't in as many people's systems as they used to be. The other factor is that, even though many features of EAX will be supported by Vista, general purpose hardware sound acceleration is not. So with fewer benefits why should users be inclined to buy Creative's products at all?

Careful Creative don't strain yourself.

I wouldn't bother with a PCIe card from Creative until their third or fourth try, at least. As has already been pointed out, they've said in the past that PCIe isn't good for sound cards; I seriously doubt they've solved all of the problems they were seeing.

Plus, they thought PCI was good for sound cards, and look at the all the problems with their PCI implementations.

Am I the only one that thinks the m-audio blue pcb seems a little out of place? I'll go out on a limb and say its because it is a pre-production model... but almost every creative sound card is either black or green. Maybe creative decided that instead of suing m-audio to death, they would simply flood the market with m-audio look a likes.

Awesome, give it DD encoding on the fly and I'll buy it.

it's about time! x2

FWIW the Audigy 2 ZS Notebook also uses a very small audio chip compared to the PCI A2ZS.