64 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2005
T
here’s a Mafia-style war raging around
your PC. The MPEG-2 decoder card?
Found face down in a Dumpster. The LAN
card? Gunned down as he was leaving the
social club. And no one’s seen the poor
modem since he was “Hoffa’d” in the 1990s.
Who’s responsible? All evidence
points to the Host-based family, and
none other than Don Processor himself,
who has been consolidating power and
resources on the motherboard for more
than a decade now. After all, who the hell
needs add-in cards when you can use the
CPU to handle every PC chore?
Amid this upheaval, we didn’t expect
the soundcard to stick around, but boy has
it, in the form of Creative Labs’ audacious
new Sound Blaster X-Fi series. Instead of
knuckling under and going host-based like
other soundcard makers, Creative spent
money on a new DSP and architecture.
With its 400MHz core speed, 51 million
transistors and 10,000 MIPS, the X-Fi,
according to Creative, has 24 times the
power of an Audigy 2 ZS and equals the
power of a 3.4GHz general-purpose CPU.
Creative is building the X-Fi into three
distinct PCBs, with four versions of thecard available at retail: The basic X-Fi
XtremeMusic features a multichannel 24-bit
Cirrus Logic DAC, a Wolfson 24-bit ADC,
and 2MB of “XRAM.” The X-Fi Platinum
adds a bay adapter to the XtremeMusic’s
mix. The Fatal1ty FPS uses the same DACs
as the XtremeMusic but ups the XRAM to
64MB and gives you a status LED. All three
can hit 109dB SNR, which is just a tick
better than the 2 ZS’ 108dB. The Elite Pro
can hit 116dB thanks to its higher-end AKM
DAC. What’s XRAM for? It will act as a local
audio buffer eventually, but right now, it
doesn’t do much.
But enough about the hardware, what
really matters is the sound. We tested the
Fatal1ty FPS and XtremeMusic versions to
see if Creative’s new cards live up to the
SNR claims. When compared with Intel’s
HD Audio, we can say there’s no contest.
In music and movies, the X-Fi sounded
head-and-shoulders better than HD Audio.
HD Audio’s gaming performance was also
inferior. In Battlefield 2, comm chatter
sounded synthetic and the positional
effect was piss-poor. With the X-Fi, a
tank’s engine rumble was occluded when
it moved around a corner to the other side
of a building. We could even discern an
audible difference when running with our
“face” forward or pointed at the ground.
That’s the strength of the X-Fi, which
is the first card to combine technology
from Aureal, Sensaura, and Creative. As
you’d expect from that kind of pedigree, it
sounds fantastic.
Furthermore, we experienced actual
game hitches in Battlefield 2 with HD Audio.
With the X-Fi, there were none. Why? We
suspect that 16 bots plus audio chores isreviewsTESTED. REVIEWED. VERDICTIZED
All X-Fi cards pump out superb positional audio for gaming.The X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS tosses in a drive
bay and a remote.Creative
Labs Sound
Blaster X-Fi
The soundcard finally strikes back
X-FI HD AUDIO HD AUDIO DDLTest system: 3.73GHz P4EE, Asus P5WD, GeForce 6800 Ultra, 1GB DDR2/667.3DMARK 2003 0 SOUNDS (FPS) 98.5 99.9 92.0
3DMARK 2003 24 SOUNDS (FPS) 84.6 84.5 79.4
QUAKE III (FPS) 388 382 355BENCHMARKS
SPECS
X-FI CARD PORTS FEATURES ACCESSORIES PRICE
XTREMEMUSIC 3 line-out, 1 combo mic-in,
line-in, digital I/OCirrus Logic CS4382 DAC,
Wolfson WM8775 ADC.
Rated at 109dB. 2MB of
XRAMN/A $130PLATINUM 3 line-out, 1 combo mic-in,
line-in, digital I/O. Bay adapter:
MIDI-in and -out, line-in, mic-
in, aux-in, headphone, SPDIF-
in and -out, optical-in and -outCirrus Logic CS4382 DAC,
Wolfson WM8775 ADC.
Rated at 109dB. 2MB of
XRAM5.25-inch
bay adapter
with audio
ports, remote
control$200FATAL1TY FPS 3 line out, 1 combo mic-in,
line-in, digital I/O. Bay adapter:
MIDI in and out, line in, mic-in,
aux-in, headphone, SPDIF-in
and -out, optical-in and -outCirrus Logic CS4382 DAC,
Wolfson WM8775 ADC.
Rated at 109dB. 64MB of
XRAM.5.25-inch
bay adapter
with audio
ports, remote
control$280X-FI ELITE PRO 3 line-out, 1 combo mic-in,
line-in, digital I/O. External
console: aux-in and -out, DIN,
MIDI-in and -out, optical-in
and -out, line-in/mic-in, line-in,
hi-z, headphonesHigher quality CS4398 ADC
and AKM 5394AVS DAC.
Rated at 116dB signal to
noise ratio. 64MB of XRAMExternal
bay, remote
control, RIAA
preamp for
recording
from records$400