Soundstorm better reappear in Nforce5 as I will not be putting any creative garbage in any future PC of mine!

X-RAM is one of the most overhyped product features to ever come across a "gaming" product. It makes absoutely no sense when it commands a hefy prenium which means only a tiny minority of the gaming market is willing to stomach the price tag. IIRC, game developers typically do not cater to the top 2% of the market for certain product features. They usually stick to the bottom line where the vast majority still perfer to use intergrated sound or a cheap discrete solution.

I blame Counter-Strike!

Ever since the influx of n00bs from CS, I have seen a rise in "Gamer" branded crap/hardware. Before CS ‘Gamer Hardware’ wouldn’t have gone five feet before falling flat onto its face; mainly because the people at that time where not suckers/n00bs. Now gamer hardware is overtaking the mainstream along with the computer illiterate pre-modding idiots.

Gamer hardware = fancy package of regular hardware; sold at 2-4x what it would normally go for if it wasn’t for the marketing and idiots that give into that crap.

Now many of you will go "well the Fatal1ty card has set itself from the crowed with the onboard ram. It's totally revolutionary and unique to the gamer hardware." But if the x-ram wasn’t on the fatality card and gamer branded hardware didn’t mean a dam thing, then you better bet the x-ram would be on your run of the mill general mainstream creative cards and sold at a decent price.

BTW is it just me when I say that I think BF2 gets better frames per second just for the fact that BF2 'DETECTS' the x-ram sound card rather than the x-ram really doing anything to the performance of the game? Sure the game might sound better than other cards, but is the difference in FPS performance really reflecting the x-ram or code that EA/Creative have put into BF2 to unlock extra a few extra FPS for x-ram users?

I blew my money on the x-fi elite. I could not find one sound card that had a hotplug for my electric guitar. Searched everywhere, and nothing. I'd never buy a card cus a gamers face is on it. way too lame.

I don't understand why they feel that x-ram is something they can charge an extra $75 -$100 for (over the Platinum, which also has the remote, the control panel, etc). The memory interface is on the chip whether you get an x-ram equipped card or not, so the incremental cost is just the memory itself. What's 64MB of fairly slow memory cost?

It seems to be a typical market segmentation strategy for Creative, so no real surprise though.

our results are hardly a condemnation of X-RAM as a technology.

It may not be a condemnation of the technology, but it's a condemnation of the concept. As long as market penetration is insignificant, it's only going to be implemented as an afterthought in a handful of games. It's the same thing as the bump mapping support in the Matrox G400, which only got supported in one or two games.

This really shouldn't surprise anyone paying attention. Creative has been looking for a way to package marginally better products into more expensive packaging ever since the first Live! release.

Call me backward, but considering the power of CPUs today (I run an Athlon X2 3800 at 2.2GHz), I'm not particularly concerned about CPU usage from my audio solution. I'm sticking with my M-Audio Revolution 7.1 card.

Before contemplating any purchase of any X-Fi card, see this thread:-

http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soun...

By far the longest thread in the SB forums (102 pages, so far) and still continuing

And make sure that the heatsink is present on the one that you buy. Apparently the heat-sink is present on all newer models. Not to say that Creative's firmware update on these newer models is a real fix at all. It is astonishing how reticent Creative has been with regard to giving any technical details on their findings with regard to the noise problems, or any seriously-useful suggestions on customer-enabled fixes, so what are they hiding ???

I have held off buying a X-Fi card until this "smoke" has completely cleared. According to some posters in the above forum, the noise problem seems to be associated with disk-accesses and only on the analog outputs of the X-Fi --- which seems more like poor power-supply isolation and/or shielding on the X-Fi card than any software problem -- just like the analog-output noise problems that appear on almost all motherboards with integrated-audio during disk-accesses or high CPU-activity.

Dear TR, please review this:

http://www.auzentech.com/products_xplosion.html

Analog sound + modern computer internals = no thanks
Also creative just plain leaves a nasty sour taste in my mouth. I've had enough of their crap for life.

In the future, distant at Creative's pace, maybe they will make a pci express version with a "turbocache TM" or "Hypermemory TM" to replace the onboard x-ram for the value users. If a feature is going to be useless at least give it a cool marchatecture name, and many, many more LEDs. Turbo Xram Xtreme XTX XXX XP Type X CrApAl1tee sounds good to me ;)

I don't have a problem with "Fatal1ty" putting his name on stuff, but every product I've seen commands an outrageous price premium over the non-Fatal1ty edition that is in no way worth it.

M-Audio Revolution FTW.

It truly is interesting how well the ALC850 kept up with the Joneses....

Much more then I would have thought.

Gotta ask yourself how much the improvement is worth to you.

For me, it's not worth more then..say...$60 over integrated sound.

*Hugs my old Hercules Fortissimo II card*

The only "extra" thing included I think I could find a use for would be the MIDI ports, and even then I'd go with the Xtreme Music and spend $35 on a Yamaha UX-16, pocketing the $65 difference. Or I could get more MIDI channels on a UX-48 and still save a few bucks over this thing.

Raise your hand if you suspected the X-RAM was just a big joke.

....*Raises hand quietly*

Good review but I think the X-Fi card should've been compared to the Audigy2 ZS as well. We all knew the X-Fi would've performed/sounded better than the integrated sound card, but not against Creative's older products that still seem to work well for far less.

Well until I see a PCIe sound solution it is going to be on board sound for me.

Since that is the only slot I have availible in my system.

Not to mention that to prevent envoking the wrath I have to wear headphones most of the time some of that fancy positional stuff is lost on me.

The green isn't as easy on the eyes as the blue.

But it's a really nice personal touch. Happy St-Pat!

I'm still gonna git one, put it right next to my AEGIA PhysX card!

Oh Ya.... Nice GREEN front page TR....

Happy Corrupt the Irish with Christianity Day !

LOL, WTH....green front page....is something wrong ?

XtremeMusic it is.

It'll be a cold day in hell before I give my money to a kid who plays video games for a living! *hugs my Santa Cruz card*

Fatal1ty is teh ghey.

NTTIAWWT

Nice card though, but too expensive, as with all Fatal1ghey.

Sorry, I'm in a bad mood this morning.

Expensive... it's hard to justify this upgrade when an audigy, sb live!, or my old fav, the turtle beach santa cruz, can be had for so much less.

I just want to make sure I'm reading this right...the difference between this and an X-Fi Platinum w/ front panel is $100 and 64 megs of ram?
You know, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure $100 gets pretty near to 2 gigs of DDR now. I wonder what Creative's smoking.

Why is the remote upside down?

Geoff,

First of all, thanks for the review. I was actually seriously considering buying one of these (the XtremeXMusiX version) so the articles are very much appreciated.

But then, a little while after the launch of the X-Fi Creative also made available a bunch of budget boards, among them the Audigy 4 basic edition. This card costs almost half as much as the basic X-Fi. S/N figures are VERY close, with 106dB for the Audigy 4 versus 109dB for the X-Fi. (I know there is much more to sound quality than just S/N but it's the only figure available on the Creative site) Then of course the X-Fi has EAX5.0, plus an entirely new architecture. However, I don't really know how this translates into a sound quality/performance difference. Also, top-of-the range Soundblaster cards used to come with a rich gaming bundle (I got Deus Ex, Thief and MDK2 with my Live 5.1!!!), but not anymore, so there is less going for the X-Fi even in this respect. Therefore, I am a bit hesitant to shell out twice the money for possibly not much more.

So... Would it be possible to add the Audigy 4 to the cards reviewed for comparison? :)

It's 2:15 in the morning here, and I'm checking TR. I'm such a nerd....Hmmmm go to bed or read new review.....go to bed or read new review....sleeeeep....Screw it, I'm reading this.