Any news of a new Creative sound card series?

theforce

theforce

theforce

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It has been some time since Asus entered the sound card market. With no doubt the market share of Creative has dropped but yet we haven't heard any news about Creative releasing a new sound card to regain what was lost.

Creative sound cards are still the first choice for gamers but gaming is not something the Asus card suck at either and from many reviews they provide best audio quality for music and movies. The recent release of the Xonar Essence shows that Asus seriously wants to become the new top dog in the sound card market.

I was hoping for Creative and Asus to go head to head and release new products every year or so. Anyway l am pretty sure that Creative has something in development to mess up Asus plans and l doubt Asus is waiting for Creative to respond before thet start designing their new sound card.

Anyone heard anything about this?
 
Is their driver support still pants?

I laid down 200 big ones for an Elite PRO last January thinking I was getting the best I could and it turned into a nightmare, sold it a month later.

Soooo disappointing.

Their driver support and lack of customer/community support was the reason I got rid.
 
Driver support on both Creative and Asus sucks a bit really. ATI and NVIDIA have led us to expect certain standards. It's all one big fail for soundcards, by comparison.
 
^only realtek release driver sets really often :(

the newest set from both creative and asus seem pretty solid so far anyhow


there were rumours of xfi2 a few years back, but haven't heard anything..


bought my xfi xtreme music on release week, still going strong
 
The only game I've encountered a problem with was EverQuest I when dual boxing with a X-Fi Titanium i.e. Crackling sound,

I think people with World of Warcraft were experiancing similar problems.

I'm using a Nvidia GTX295 graphics card, the solution could be one of two things.

1) In Nvidia control panel - where it says "Enable multi-gpu mode" tick "Do not use multi-gpu mode"

2) Try the new beta driver 2_17_0007 but I dont think this was the fix, if the above doesnt work try the new beta driver.

Because my graphics card has 2 graphics processors on the card, my assumption is that its taking too much bandwidth from the PCI-E chipset, anyway I've fixed mine.

A friend of mine was using 2 8800GTX in Sli & he had the exact same problem.

Apart from this, I dont think their is anything else wrong with the current drivers, they work fine in Vista 64bit Ultimate.
 
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bledd. said:
^only realtek release driver sets really often :(

the newest set from both creative and asus seem pretty solid so far anyhow


there were rumours of xfi2 a few years back, but haven't heard anything..


bought my xfi xtreme music on release week, still going strong
Click to expand...

Realtek are fairly solid for drivers, but I'm not actually sure WHAT exactly they update so often!
 
varkanoid said:
How much RAM tho ? X-Fi hates anything over 4mb its very hit or miss.
Click to expand...

It depends on the exact model of X-Fi. I tried an OEM Xtreme Music and was greeted with nothing but silence when I upgraded to 4GB. Later tried an X-Fi Prelude and it worked perfectly. The system was otherwise pretty much unchanged.

I'm told recent Xtreme Music cards are fine, and many systems have no such problem, even with the older cards.
 
The x-fi drivers have been fine for at least a year, maybe more. There has been little reason to update recently since the 4GB problem was addressed, and that was the only serious software issue. There are certainly still some hardware-level problems on certain configurations, but driver support is fine. They were very quick on getting out win7 drivers too, almost to prove a point perhaps?

Only issue with mine is crackling noises when watching TV (i.e. PCI-E TV card and PCI x-fi working at the same time), and nothing I've tried can solve it. It's even the same on a different mobo. Still, the improvement over onboard is just astonishing to me.

Should they release some new models around the £50 that don't suffer from the problem I have, and boast better sound quality, I'd certainly look into investing in one.
 
There was rumours off the Xfi 2 but that was like 6 months ago and no concrete or confirmations on it sadly....

would have prefered it over te Asus cards tbh simply since its build with features and front drive box but will see how it all goes ;)
 
Aye, I waited for a long time to see if Creative would make something else, especially because they make front panels and drive bays.

The Essence STX with a front bay would have been an absolute winner.
 
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