Intel onboard Sound or Creative X-Fi

Pinkeyes

Pinkeyes

Pinkeyes

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30 May 2005
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Greater Manchester
Hi

Currently in between PCs and pricing up some new parts.

Currently settled on the Intel DP35DP Dragon Tail Peak iP35 motherboard which has 8 Channel Audio.

In the past I haven't always been very impressed with onboard sound, and was planning to add a Creative X-Fi Xtreme PCI-E Soundcard to the shopping list.

I plan to use this PC primarily for gaming on a Vista Ultimate PC.

Would I be better off with the Creative, or will the Intel onboard 8-Channel be good enough ?

Thanks
 
x-fi xtreme's are very poor cards. they are really just rebadged audigy se's. ill just copy this from the wiki

The market segment occupied by the XtremeMusic was moved downwards, with the introduction of the (cheaper) 'Xtreme Audio' and 'Xtreme Audio Notebook' products, which, despite the "X-Fi" label, are the only products in the X-Fi line not using the EMU20K1 chip (CA20K1)[3] (CA0106-WBTLF)[4] and thus lacking the hardware acceleration of 3D sound and EAX sound effects, gaming and content creation features and the I/O extensibility of all the other X-Fi models. Despite the name, the Xtreme Gamer card offers a better signal-to-noise ratio and lower total harmonic distortion than the Xtreme Audio, and is hence a better card even purely for music use, though the marketing of the two products suggests that Creative believes the cheaper product to be adequate for most users.
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if you want a pci-e card then the Asus xonar dx is the best value card you can get. very close to the performance of the d2 and d2x for half the price. by far better than any x-fi, save the Elite Pro:)

i imaging the xtreme audio wouldnt better than onboard at all, but the xonar dx would easily better it in all areas
 
Hey James,

Thanks very much for that info, almost immediately crossed that X-Fi off my shopping list. Never really been happy with Creative cards at all anyway.

I was a little surprised by this thread though http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17875598 regarding the Xonar, especially after hearing such good reviews of it (the two games I am currently playing are TF2 and Bioshock),you yourself mentioned you couldn't get bioshock to work at.
 
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