PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series

By 

Gil Knutson –

  

I expected an improvement over my ancient Creative card. This one is head and shoulders beyond it. If you don’t place the settings too crazy, and keep it more “level” it sounds very excellent on my relatively poor Altec Lansing receiver. Much more volume, so the headroom is evenhanded; it still wants a excellent headphone amp if you want the best, though… but, it sounds believable.

It was expensive, yes, but so far from what I have heard in two weeks of listening, I will be able to have very excellent sound through a lot of motherboard upgrades with this card. The RCA inputs are an vital, added feature for me, as is the volume control. I am glad I “bit the bullet”.

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By 

J. T. Pietrewicz (Deland,Fla.) –

  

I was blown away by the sound quality of this unit.It’s a huge
improvement over the onboard realtek chip.Clarity and directional
positioning in games is incredible and music is vastly improved.
The cmss-3d with receiver does a fantastic job with 5.1 simulation.
Also to note,installation on Vista was a breeze.I installed from
the disc and let auto update do the rest.The software is a bit
bloated but the bells and whistles are fun.You can also do a custom
install and select what you want.If you game or delight in music you can’t
go incorrect.I highly recommend this card.

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I just picked one of these up because I grew tired of waiting over a year and a half for the maker of my integrated audio chip, to give a functioning driver. The SigmaTel / IDT chip on my Intel board was decent enough for playback but the drivers were so terrible and lacked things like input monitoring, proper switching of recording inputs while in games for voice coms, etc. The drivers would crash and I would lose my mic. They were just dreadful. BTW Sigmatel / IDT finally as of a month or so ago added input monitoring to their driver and it still doesnt work. Sigmatel/IDT’s new driver also has a huge memory leak where the driver process will use up to 35% CPU. You have to kill the process then regenerate it to fix it everytime it happens. ENOUGH with Sigmtel /IDT. I cant stand them and That is why i bought a Creative Sound Blaster X-FI Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series card. (Yes the name is stupidly long)

I was worried because its branded with “Fatal1ty” gamer nonsense and I read some terrible things about it online. Everyone seems to bash Creative these days and many are even praising integrated audio solutions such as Sigmatel/IDT and RealTek. Personally, I dont get it. Sigmatel/IDT’s integrated products are terrible. Do not rely in integrated audio for quality drivers or quality audio. DO NOT buy into the myth that integrated audio has caught up to Audio Card quality. They havent. Once that chip is on the motherboard, the manufacturers seem to forget about supporting it.

Sound Blaster is just the contrary. I’ve owned Creative Labs cards since the first Sound Blaster. They have been the backbone of PC audio. This card is incredible. It has very small EMI noise. It has incredible sound quality, very nice high’s mids, lows and its output levels are stronger than my peice of crap integrated audio chip which had terrible EMI noise, and terrible drivers. Basically my motherboards integrated audio was worthless and a year long headache.

THIS IS THE CARD TO GET. It cost a lot, but the drivers are solid. It functions as it should. It sounds incredible, and you can count on creative supporting it for many years to come.

DO NOT RELY ON INTEGRATED AUDIO CHIPS. Their drivers are pathetic. That is the lesson here. Do not fall for the misinformation out there. Integrated audio is fine for listening to things but they fail at doing even some of the most basic of audio tasks due to their poor driver help. Creative’s X-FI Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series has superior sound quality and brilliant driver help. That is what you should be demanding from manufacturers, and if you have to pay a premium for it… so be it. Its far better than waiting a year and a half like i did for Sigmatel/IDT to relief a driver that worked 75% of the time.

BTW The breakout box that goes in the front of your case is very helpful. I recommend buying this one rather than the one without it. If you play games and use voice coms, get the drive bay inputs.

Again, I cant stress this enough. It is such a relief to not have to deal with my motherboard’s integrated audio anymore. Do it right from the start. GET THIS CARD.

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