X-fi titanium or Asus D2x?

TheFloyd73

TheFloyd73

TheFloyd73

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Hi folks,

Was planning on getting the Creative X-Fi titanium for a new build I'm going to be doing in the next few months, but the price has gone up from around £115 at the end of last year to £174.99 today! In an effort to try and save a few pennies I'm now looking at either the titanium (minus the front port) or the Asus D2X which will save me about £70-£90. Just curious to know whether there's any real difference between the two?

The card will be used for both music and gaming in equal measure; I'll be using a pair of Sennheiser 595's as I don't have any surround speakers, and don't plan on getting any just yet. I have a 6+ year old Dell which is still alive (just) and current have the Creative extreme audio card, which I was impressed to start with, but on some songs the headphone setting doesn't quite sound right...but on others it sounds amazing.

As the name suggests, I listen to 70's stuff mostly - Floyd, Roxy Music, Clapton but some newer stuff...Dave Matthews Band, Porcupine Tree etc. Gaming will mostly be FPS. Curious to know what people would go for if they had the choice?

Appreciate any ideas...thanks!
 
Just a heads up that Creative will be releaseing a new card called X-Fi Titanium HD soon.

I using a PCI X-Fi Elite Pro and I am very happy with that.

But I need to find a decent PCI-E soundcard now as I planning to go crossfire and I will lose my PCI slot.

I hear that driver support for both companies is bad (Creative and ASUS).

I have been lucky that haven't had any issues with the Creative drivers for my PCI X-Fi Elite Pro.

I was waiting for the X-Fi Titanium HD, unless that I can pick up a Creative X-Fi titanium S/H.
 
The Titanium isn't £174.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=SC-065-CL&groupid=701&catid=11&subcat=

You were looking at the Titanium Fatality Champion.

Edit: I used to recommend Xonars over X-Fis for music with headphone. However - I've been impressed with recent versions of the DLLs used for Dolby Headphone in software DVD players. The ones I tried earlier were not as good as the Xonar implementation. I'm now using the PowerDVD9 ultra version of the Dolby Headphone .dll and I think it's pretty close to, if not on par with, Xonar's implementation. I still prefer Asus's Dolby Headphone for gaming over CMSS-3D but several other gaming features are better on X-Fi. I've ended up using an X-Fi outputting Dolby Digital Live over optical to an external Dolby Headphone receiver to get the best of both worlds.

The Xonar D1 or DX do have the advantage of still being cheaper than the Titanium. If you care a lot about surround and EAX compatibility in older games I would go with X-Fi, as Creative's Alchemy is a bit more robust than Asus's DS3D-GX. If you'll be doing more music listening and movie watching, the Xonar is probably a little more user friendly. Unless you need DTS encoding over optical I would say save some money and go with the D1 or DX over the D2 or D2X.

I can't comment on pure analogue sound quality of the two cards you mentioned as I haven't used those particular cards
 
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i have the titanium fatal1ty pro without the panel, and i have no complaints with it, its a really good card and, if you can manage to get some digital speakers, your music will sound even better :)
 
Well ive got both a X-Fi titanium and a DX2 . in different systems
both have plus and negative points..
IMHO .. games go for xfi ,
music got for DX
 
_lecro_ said:
Well ive got both a X-Fi titanium and a DX2 . in different systems
both have plus and negative points..
IMHO .. games go for xfi ,
music got for DX
Click to expand...

+1

XFI just works in games and gives outstanding surround sound, the D2/D2x is a little soft on sound not as sharp/clear as the XFI for games. But also current D2x drivers don't play well in Win 7 (for games surround proper 5.1/7.1) however the dolby virtual surround works very well.

Just put my D2 into the media center and for TV/music/movies it add's punch to these.

Had to get an XFI for my gaming rig cos my 5.1 cans were not working to full potential with the D2.

depends on what your main use is really.
 
Thanks

Appreciate all the thoughts so far... will keep an eye out for the new Creative card, even if it means that it forces the prices down a little on the others (maybe...)! Interesting that most people seem to rate the two 50/50, I thought the Asus had better drivers.
 
Well, I guess that the first poster wants to focus on ASUS Xonar D2X rather than D2. The 2 models did have some difference.

Compared to Xonar D2, the D2X shows a much improved noise level, which is also better than Creative Labs' own X-Fi part.

Besides, Xonar D2X outperforms the X-Fi-based cards on Total Harmonic Distortion (THD), while also showing slight improvements over the Xonar D2.

About the driver, I would personally back up Xonar D2X. I don’t think Creative can go too far in its notorious driver.
 
i have had both and currently own the xonar

in my opinion, the xfi is vastly inferior with shambolic driver support.

i had to download a modified version of the creative drivers to get the card working correctly

there is one word that makes me look away from creative - 'flexijack'
 
Driver support is really a big big issue of Creative and it seems Creative still has no schedule to solve this problem. Besides hissing noise, popping sound coming unregularly is another bothering of Creative. Think twice before getting a piece from Creative.
 
Well...u have to admit that you compare 2 audio cards from different level. For SNR, Xonar is 118dB while X-Fi titanium is just 109dB. Besides, Xonar D2X is complete on Dolby/DTS technologies which mostly are unseen in X-Fi titanium. About sample rate, X-Fi titanium (96khz) is just half of that in Xonar D2X(192Khz).
 
The Titanium does have Dolby Digital Live and DTS Connect, but not the other Dolby stuff. Mainly because Creative's own CMSS takes the place of Dolby Headphone, Pro Logic, etc.

The Fatal1ty version of the card is a complete joke at almost £120. Creative saw you coming, to whoever bought that. Maybe Creative can pull their finger out of their butt, and make a decent job of this new card they have planned. I mean drivers that work, and a non inflated price tag just because it has a fancy name attached.
 
I had an X-Fi card and although the sound was good I found my xonar d2x really blew me away when I first heard it. The amplifier seems more powerfull driving my sennheisers far better and the clarity of audio is superb whether I'm listening to FLAC or MP3.

I've always had creative in the past and was a bit nervous about going for the asus but I shouldn't have been.

I have no hissing or popping with the xonar like I occasionally experienced with certain drivers on the creative.

The DAC's on the xonar are Burr-Brown as well and pretty decent. Not sure what the new creative cards are using?
 
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