Gaming soundcard?

fish99

fish99

fish99

Soldato
Joined
19 May 2005
Posts
5,053
Location
Doncaster
Hi, my brother has Mass Effect for PC and has serious issues with the sound on his Audigy 1, and it turns out the game doesn't support the card, so we're looking at a new gaming soundcard.

Firstly I'm amazed there's so little available now, I'm guessing the soundcard market has largely died. Looks like for a gaming card the old X-FI XtremeMusic (the cheapest of the real X-Fi's) is still the best bang for the buck out there (as it was 2 years or more ago :eek: ). The only other option I can think of would be a 2nd hand Audigy 2 ZS or Audigy 4 but that's a bit of a dead end driver wise.

Actually I'm just looking here at the X-Fi Xtreme Audio for £27 and that looks to have the real X-Fi chip on it, can anyone confirm that? Will it do hardware DS3D acceleration and EAXHD and not eat up CPU cycles?

Or otherwise does anyone have any other recommendations?
Cheers muchly,
Simon.
 
Cheers lads, I think the X-Fi is just a slightly safer bet wrt driver support longevity, so will go with that.
 
I have an XtremeMusic currently and am switching to a Xonar D2. The X-Fi has caused me various problems, particularly in vista. It sounds good but I'm tired of it. We'll soon see how much of a difference the Xonar makes.
 
Only problems I've had is on a couple of times the X-Fi has disappeared. But I do know these cards cause tons of problems across multiple motherboard chipsets.
 
my extreme music used to be fine, until I installed the latest drivers, and now it buzzes and hisses all the time randomly for no good reason
 
X-fi Xtremegamer is cheap and does the job well. Creative drivers are, dare I say it, pretty much spot on now, no issues at all for me on Vista64.
 
One of the things I hated most about Creative's drivers is that they feel it is necessary to scatter practically hundreds of files all over your hard drive. For example, roughly the following happens when you install a driver package:
  • Files installed into the regular location for drivers
  • Files installed into Program Files\Creative
  • Files installed into 'Creative Installation Information' and is set to hidden
  • Files installed into an obscure 'Data' directory in one of the system folders
  • Files installed into the hidden 'app data' folder within documents directory
  • Numerous driver entries added into the 'hidden devices' list of device manager
The best bit about the whole thing? No uninstaller provided. Instead, they ask you to use the 'uninstall feature' of device manager to remove your card... only problem is that only removes the main driver files, none of the extra rubbish/registry entries... and you've still got all those hidden devices leftover, thus making a clean install a complete nightmare. I really can't understand why they need so many files scattered everywhere, surely a lot of them could be consolidated. Then again, that would require some effort on their part, so I can see why they'd never bother looking at that.

Bitter at Creative? Yes indeed, and I never had a problem with my XFI card in terms of functionality. :p
 
just got bored and reinstalled my xtreme music after it started to buzz badly with-in 20mins in a game, and im sure it fixed itself, well i used the youp-pax driver works a charm now not had a problem so far, running for 6 hours now (fingers crossed) :P
 
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