Thinking about buying a X-Fi

[Reece]

Thanks Arclight, I will give it a go, I use my pc for HF utility station decoding & weather sat decoding, having just 1 input is a pain, so I might try input from onboard and output from X-Fi card, what could go wrong!!

[Arclight]

I even "succesfully deploy" 3 cards; X-fi add-in card, onboard Realtek chip, usb souncard that came with the headset. You could get some issues with IRQ sharing, but it should all be possible and this problem didn't occur for me untill I moved to Win7 64-bit, liked stated above.

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

All the Realtek ALC models do hardware processing. THey are so accurate, Creative Labs now certifies the ALC 88X series to run Creative Labs software.

http://www.gigabyte.us/FileList/WebP...090106_xfi.htm

-S

I have ALC 889A on my board, and I'm pretty sure they don't do hardware acceleration. I definetely can't enable it in games. Remember the X-fi extreme audio? X-fi brand, but no such chip. I think the Realtek chips offer X-fi features through emulation, ie the load still goes to the CPU.



Goldorak, I agree Creative cards aren't worth it, much like Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. But you're less likely to experience problems with these things, since they're the "standard". And no, EAX is bolocks. Most games don't support it, and the ones that do haven't given me the impression that it really makes much difference.

[Zachstar]

Simply put. Until they get serious about 64bit support and WIn7 I would not consider an X-Fi

They used to be the best but in my view they have been too smug in their superiority and allowed even Realtek to catch up. The modern Realtek chipsets are good enough for me to play ARMA II through analog 5.1 to my 300 dollar receiver.

For a dedicated card tho. In my view C-media is the best bang for the buck. The quality is great and they are built for gaming. Many people like to use the USB based ones for headsets or even laptop gaming because they fit such quality into such small form factors.

[Zachstar]

I used to think EAX is what gave games the ability to do 5.1 but isn't it Directsound that does that these days?

OH forgot to mention about C-Media folks. It is by far best to get drivers from the C-Media website for your C-media cards chipset. Then you can pretty much safely ignore whoever made the card.

So even this POS becomes quality because of the chipset. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16829130001

[SUBMAN1]

Originally Posted by Arclight

I even "succesfully deploy" 3 cards; X-fi add-in card, onboard Realtek chip, usb souncard that came with the headset. You could get some issues with IRQ sharing, but it should all be possible and this problem didn't occur for me untill I moved to Win7 64-bit, liked stated above.
I have ALC 889A on my board, and I'm pretty sure they don't do hardware acceleration. I definetely can't enable it in games. Remember the X-fi extreme audio? X-fi brand, but no such chip. I think the Realtek chips offer X-fi features through emulation, ie the load still goes to the CPU.



Goldorak, I agree Creative cards aren't worth it, much like Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. But you're less likely to experience problems with these things, since they're the "standard". And no, EAX is bolocks. Most games don't support it, and the ones that do haven't given me the impression that it really makes much difference.

Realtek ALC889A's by the way are faster at accelerating audio than CL's X-Fi, so please provide more details than what you provided. Even the 880's where on par with X-Fi back a year or two ago, so I'm not understanding that statement.

EAX BTW makes a dramatic effect with things such as echo's in a hallway, or distance. The question is, does your game support it? Some games do, some games support older rev's like EAX 2.0, and some don't at all. The Thief series, and games like System Shock 2 that rely on sound to raise the hair on the back of your neck and you will know what I am talking about. There are some games that overdid it though. EAX can give you an advatage when playing online FPS games too by helping you judge how far away a shot came.

A fix for you is to load OpenAL since I think DX10 drops hardware acceleration, which is dumb, but we are talking about Microsoft here and they have been known to do dumb things once in a while (Vista.... cough cough..). If it is Vista one is running, they should upgrade to XP and hardware accelerated sound. Windows 7, well, OpenAL is a second best solution. Creative Lab card or not, you will not get any HW acceleration unless you have OpenAL. OpenAL is loaded by default with Creative Labs cards on Vista however (I think). I remember reading that a while back.

There is an advantage to a dedicated card and that is it should have less 'interference' than onboard audio, so if you are a musician, or if you have a really noisey motherboard (ASUS.... cough cough....), then an X-Fi may be for you.

Spoke my 2 cents.

-S

[Arclight]

I honestly can't find anything that clearly points either way.

I just always thought onboard chips don't offer hardware acceleration. As for EAX, maybe I never had a good comparison, or just never played anything that implemented it properly. Still, support is so rare it's hardly a reason to purchase.

Thinking I don't have OpenAl installed is just insulting my intelligence. :rotfl:

You seem to indicate CL doesn't offer proper support for 64-bit OS. this would explain why problems suddenly popped up for me.
Lazy gits. The only thing Creative is their marketing.

[Reece]

Subman1 Said:
if you have a really noisey motherboard (ASUS.... cough cough....), then an X-Fi may be for you.

I'm choking Subman .... cough cough!!

[SUBMAN1]

Originally Posted by Reece

I'm choking Subman .... cough cough!!

Hahahaha! I'm done with ASUS. Between drivers and a noisey design, I've had it. I paid $200 for my last board, and have bought them since 1991 (or '92? Can't rmember, but I have over 10 years history with them). They used to be one of the best way back when. I remember installing 1MB of cache (in a day when 128k was good!) on an ASUS board. Their quality lately is a noisey design. I have my old ASUS right next to me and it had so much noise in the soundcard that it was annoying. Especially when you cranked your speakers with no sound being generated. I could clearly pick out when the CD-ROM was accessing above the fans in my system, and knew where it was in its access cycle!

My new Gigabyte (who I have also bought in the past) does not have this problem. It's probably the 2 oz solid copper layers, but that's another story. I ahve another problem with the Giagbyte - the stupid sound selection only allows for side channel when doing quadrophonic or 5.1 sound? WTH? This is a driver problem though and not a hardware problem. I might load an ASUS driver to fix the problem.

Anyway, with each motherboard I have ever owned (I've only owned cutting edge version so this may be part of the problem), there is always some pluses and minuses. Do not even ask me about ASUS RAID drivers and Linux support..... The Gigabyte so far has had only one problem - that side speaker driver thing. I think this ranks as the least amount of problems on any motherboard upgrade I have ever done. My last Gigabyte had a more anoying problem is why it didn't rank higher - it had dual BIOS's and the system treated them sperately. WHen one shut off, they other started, meaning you had to shut your system off twice. This new one has dual BIOS's and doesn't have that issue. It works properly as a backup.

As always, just my 2 cents.

-S

[Zachstar]

I just reenabled my C-media card (I had it disabled so I could use the Realtek for an analog 7.1 setup)

Works great in Win 7. Just note that you need to do the settings right and that it detects when things are plugged in.