Creative's latest sound card is actually pretty good.

I wasnt reffering to PROfessional cards...And i sure wasnt reffering to Macintosh...

 

Do you believe there is something inherently different about pcie slots on macintosh that would make a soundcard work in them? If not I do not see how it shows that soundcards would not function in pcie slots.

The point about professional cards is valid, and maybe it has something to do with prices, but I fail to see any relation to whether an apple is stamped on the front of the box with an intel processor in it

 

I never said that Pciex cards CANT be build i just said that for gaming purposes i dont think that the PCIex has to offer something right now. Perhaps in the near future new Sound chips will need extra bus speed but thats another story.
The PRO card is another story since they are another league useless to us.

 

It's all moot. PCIe x1 is here to replace PCI. The sooner it happens, the better I think. We're in the next annoying stage of legacy buses here, like we used to have ISA slots taking up space that could be used for PCI slots.

PCI isn't exactly the best bus for much of anything anyway. The total bandwidth is rarely better than 80MB/s or so, and all the cards share it. So PCI can go away and I won't miss it. It has been a pain on many occasions, especially for sound cards. Vortex 1 used to crackle on it, along with my AudioPCI, Live!, etc. If one of the cards on the bus misbehaves, or if the chipset has a crap implementation, things always go badly.

 

You really believe that with the appearence of Pciex Soundcards all problems will go away ?? I find it hard to believe since every new bus comes with new problems.

 

There's something about Macs altogether that there has to be a special "Mac" hardware equivalent for every PC part that's already out there. The worst part about it is that the Mac equivalent hardware is always "late to the party".

 

Right now, there's not much in the market for the way of taking advantage of a PCIe slot. Note that sound cards were probably the slowest to make the transition to PCI (I think Creative was the last) because of legacy audio reasons... (remember DOS?) This time around, there needs to be more penetration of the hardware to go with the mobos that support the other PCIe standards (I still don't know anything that takes advantage of the PCIe 4x slot.)

Unless there's something that gives a good reason for the companies to migrate quicker, PCI will be here for another couple of years I suspect.

The poor PCI bus implementations (either on the sound card or the mobo chipsets) are annoying.. I do recall people saying that the PCIe implementation has been very good...

With the mass onboard integration of mobos, the only PCI hardware worth any consideration is a sound card, a NIC (for the NIC, only if the onboard NIC sucks or breaks), and a TV card. Onboard SATA/SATA2 (and SCSI) is more practical simply because of the PCI bandwidth limitations... I can't think of any other worthwhile components that currently use a PCI slot...

 

I think things are a bit different today than when we were switching from ISA to PCI. Most people I know have at most 1 PCI card. Many I know have zero. I myself have a PCI 802.11g card and a Audigy 2 ZS, and I'm a freak of nature in comparison to most cuz of that lol.

I give us a year or so of PCI being big. The problem right now is that there aren't many PCIe cards at all. Many things simply are unavailable. I do think that is a combination of PCIe being new and that most people don't buy addon cards other than graphics anyway so the demand isn't really there.

 

I don't think Audigy and X Fi cracking noise problems are solve-able by drivers. If it was it should have been resolved already. Reading through the forums about the problems gave me the impression that there is an intrinsinc problem with these DSP's in communicating through PCI interface. I dont remember having any problem with SB Live 5.1 though. Nobody knows anything for sure though and Creative is dead silent on the matter.

 

Quoted for truth. My last PCI card was Audigy ZS. Now all my PCI slots are empty. PCI will be easier to kill compared to ISA considering most of the people are using onboard sound, LAN, RAID etc. Mainboards ain't what they were 10 years ago.

 

You are assuming that the priority would be to move to Vista rather than preserve your investment in hardware.
That assumption is not valid for all of us. I for one am definitely going to stay with what I've got (and which works) until something forces me to change. (And once I'm forced to change, Vista is not necessarily the only alternative.)

 

That's the 24-bit Crystalizer.............

 

which my link proves does nothing more raise the volume, which may be usefull if you have poor speakers or have a noisly environment.

 

I just read that article... Too technical, but I get the point...

 

Yes it is very technical
I'm into this stuff but some stuff and some of the stuff is like .
More creative lies
Telling people you can get more dynamic range with a 16 bit source file