My X-Fi PCI-E Extreme Audio Review

MeatLoaf

MeatLoaf

MeatLoaf

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Picked one of these up today to tide me over until my extreme music comes back from RMA

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=SC-052-CL





Installation was very straight forward. Popped it in the 2nd PCI-E x16 slot on my mobo ( P5N-E SLI ), i didnt use the x1 slot as it would have interfered with my 8800GTS. Installed the drivers from the supplied CD, restarted, and we are ready to go. This is paired with a set of Creative T6100 5.1 speakers. All testing done in Windows XP. You also get the entertainment mode console that you get with the other X-Fi cards. Will try Vista later :)

Music/DVDs :

Very crisp sounding, definatly better than the audigy 1 that it has replaced. The 24bit crystalliser helps a lot.

Games :

Tested the following games :

Call of Duty 2
Doom 3
FEAR
Stalker
Lost Planet DX9

I have to say that the sound is very good - much better than i was expecting, certainly better sounding than the audigy 1.

I was under the impression that these cards lacked any sort of EAX support, but it appears that is not the case as i was able to enable full EAX support in both FEAR and Call of Duty 2, FEAR is shown in shot above. My Extreme Music CD has a Doom3 patch on it so will install that later to give it a go.

All in all i give this card 9/10 and for the price you really cant go wrong. Id go as far as to say that if someone had swapped this with my extreme music card i probably wouldnt have noticed the difference.

So my advice is to get one, especially if you still are using onboard audio :)

*EDIT* Windows Vista test results

Installed great in Vista Ultimate initially being installed by vista automatically as a High Definition Audio Device. Installing the drivers from the CD went perfectly.

Anyway, in music its much the same, still very decent.

In games i tested it with Doom 3 and Lost Planet - this time the DX10 version. To my hearing both sounded better than in XP so thats a bit weird.

So this card get a definate thumbs up :)
 
Last edited:
Yan816 said:
Brilliant! :D I can always buy a Toslink and connect my amp that way. Is the card better than my current Audigy? If so, I will order one. Again thanks for the review MeatLoaf. :cool:
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Its certainly no worse than the audigy thats for sure. Id go for it :)
 
balth_dire said:
Just another small contribution, for what it's worth.

I tested a P6N Diamond motherbord a few weeks ago, which has an integrated version of this card and I too was very impressed with the quality and stability it offered. I certainly didn't feel anything was significantly lacking either during gaming or in general.

In Oblivion, for instance, there is a known bug seemingly with all onboard audio codecs aswell as various budget add-in cards that occurs whenever the player encounters certain creatures, usually those with four legs such as deer/wolves etc, movement will immediately become very choppy, regardless of your video card/CPU spec, making the game almost unplayable. No such issue to report when using this particular card, all remained perfectly smooth.
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I didnt realise that issue was down to the onboard sound. I did have that problem but im sure i had a dedicated card in at the time.

I'll reinstall oblivion and try it out :)
 
Robbie G said:
EAX is up to version 5.0 is it not? How is 2.0 "full EAX support"?
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As far as FEAR and Call of Duty 2 is concerned it is Full spport. Theres not many games that do EAX5 at the moment. I dont think any of the ones i tested do. If you know of any decent ones i will download the demo and try it out :)
 
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