Should I ditch my X-Fi?

The crippled drivers are for older Creative hardware, the X-Fi Fatality will not be crippled. That would be a major stupid move by Creative to cripple their flagship offering! .... but then Creative has shown major stupid moves before....

Cant comment about drivers for Vista but they should probably be better now.

How about the Asus Sonar DX soundcard? matches X-Fi and better quality build aswell as using PCi-e contact. Only thing it miss is HW acceleration and true EAX3-5 simulation (only does voice number emulation as far as I know). Price should be quite decent and drivers good.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...sus-xonar-dx-7-1-pci-e-sound-card-review.html

http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/ASUS_Xonar_DX_PCI_Express_71_Audio_Card/

http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews.php?/audio/asus_xonar_dx_7_1_pci-e_sound_card/1

 

I don't think the difference between an X-Fi and a Asus Xonar will be as big as you make it out to be. I really don't think it'd be worth the extra money to dicth your xfi and go with a xonar.

 

I still have a game theater XP from forever ago. I want to buy an asus card though soon, they look nice.

 

thats a hell of a claim can you back it up ?

ps: since you allready have the card i would try it, if you dont like it change

 

The DS3D GX Tech does not need to be rerun every time you install a new game you want to emulate through to EAX. It's installed once and detects when a supported game is launched. The Creative Alchemy wrapper must be rerun whenever you install a game. If you forget to do so, the Creative EAX wrapper won't function.

 

Yes, most definitely. PM me for my address.

 

I am more interested in the next set of cards that will have the HDCP compliance or whatever built in so one can watch Bluray the way they were meant to be.

 

I ditched mine. Haven't looked back.

 

Alchemy does support every game, it's just some you have to add manually.

Like others have said you should plug your X-Fi in and try it out. You're not listening to the group think hatred about Vista why should you take other peoples' word about Creative on Vista? Just give it a go, I've been happy with my X-Fi on Vista for 18 months now. If for whatever reason you don't feel it is working out, go shopping.

 

ive been happy with mine also, but then again im on xp
i heard there were some problems with 64bit drivers i have no idea if its been fixed

 

I'll say "yes, get rid of it"and just test your onboard audio to see if you like it. Not all onboard audio is great, but there have been many diatribes on here between those of us who have good-quality onboard audio and those of them who feel it's absolutely necessary to have a seperate audio card.

Onboard audio has come an incredibly long way since the days of the original Via Audio codec. Vista only makes it better, both in terms of audio quality options and CPU overhead with it's new audio stack and driver model.

 

I ditched mine. Gave it to a friend for free. My setup is very similar to yours other than I have 8GB of RAM.

It just became too much of a pain in the ass, too unreliable, on Vista x64 with 4GB+, to be worth the trouble. So I finally cut the cord, and haven't felt any regret yet.

 

Geo when you say with 4GB+ is it becouse of a bug or? Asking becouse I am going Vista x64 and 4GB and I am thinking about a X-Fi ExtremeGamer.

 

Yes, there was a pretty notorious bug in the 64-bit Creative drivers when installed on a system with >=4Gb of memory. I believe that they put out a newer Beta in the last few weeks that addressed that particular problem, but since I'm not a Creative owner, I'm not sure that I'm right.

 

A fix for the x64/4gb bug has been in the official drivers for months.

 

In theory they claimed to fix it some months ago, but I found it to be an unreliable fix. I'd use the damn thing for weeks and it'd be fine, then it'd go right back to hissing and popping terribly. So I'd switch to onboard for a few weeks and disable the X-Fi. . . .then try the X-Fi again and if it was okay I'd leave it on until the problem re-occurred. That cycle started when I switched from Vista x32 to Vista x64 about a year ago and never went away. I finally bailed out in April of this year, I think, so I'm not aware of any developments with their drivers since.

I'm just saying, it was a major pain in the ass and more trouble than it was worth to me personally. On-board sound has improved significantly in recent years, so unless you're hardcore audiophile (and I'm not), then I'm just not seeing compelling utility for Vista x64 users. My mobo is a ASUS P5E with SoundMAX onboard.

I don't toss "upgrade" hardware out lightly, and I used it quite successfully on XP for two years prior to that, but I finally just had it with Creative. The pain/reward ratio just wasn't there for me.

 

Thanks for the reasonable and well phrased post Geo. To provide contrast the fix has worked for me without problem since I moved to x64 a few months back.

Onboard sound has gotten better but it is still onboard sound, which no hardware acceleration and a poor DAC. Analog Devices is the only company doing proper EAX2 and they recently announced they're leaving the market.

I really wish there was a healthy market with competition fighting to produce add on sound cards for an open API, but we all know the story there. When listening to GRID or Lost Planet Colonies' amazing 5.1 EAX5 sound, it makes me sad that hardware accelerated audio is not long for this world

 

I still can't use PCI-transferred audio from a tv-tuner card without getting crackling noise (though it worked for a while). Someone on their forums wrote about AMD Cool&Quiet being responsible but I haven't tried it.


In Linux I can apply all kinds of software effects I want with Pulseaudio, like a system-wide equalizer for example and it's possible in Vista too apparently. The motherboard manufacturers still have to properly integrate the available high quality on-board chips into their mobos though.


edit:
The beta 64bit Linux driver works fine but I get crackling when it hiccups or something and a unload/reload of the driver fixes this rare issue (happens when using Aptitude).