Thinking about buying a X-Fi

[Arclight]

I honestly can't find anything that clearly points either way.

I just always thought onboard chips don't offer hardware acceleration. As for EAX, maybe I never had a good comparison, or just never played anything that implemented it properly. Still, support is so rare it's hardly a reason to purchase.

Thinking I don't have OpenAl installed is just insulting my intelligence. :rotfl:

You seem to indicate CL doesn't offer proper support for 64-bit OS. this would explain why problems suddenly popped up for me.
Lazy gits. The only thing Creative is their marketing.

[Reece]

Subman1 Said:
if you have a really noisey motherboard (ASUS.... cough cough....), then an X-Fi may be for you.

I'm choking Subman .... cough cough!!

[SUBMAN1]

Originally Posted by Reece

I'm choking Subman .... cough cough!!

Hahahaha! I'm done with ASUS. Between drivers and a noisey design, I've had it. I paid $200 for my last board, and have bought them since 1991 (or '92? Can't rmember, but I have over 10 years history with them). They used to be one of the best way back when. I remember installing 1MB of cache (in a day when 128k was good!) on an ASUS board. Their quality lately is a noisey design. I have my old ASUS right next to me and it had so much noise in the soundcard that it was annoying. Especially when you cranked your speakers with no sound being generated. I could clearly pick out when the CD-ROM was accessing above the fans in my system, and knew where it was in its access cycle!

My new Gigabyte (who I have also bought in the past) does not have this problem. It's probably the 2 oz solid copper layers, but that's another story. I ahve another problem with the Giagbyte - the stupid sound selection only allows for side channel when doing quadrophonic or 5.1 sound? WTH? This is a driver problem though and not a hardware problem. I might load an ASUS driver to fix the problem.

Anyway, with each motherboard I have ever owned (I've only owned cutting edge version so this may be part of the problem), there is always some pluses and minuses. Do not even ask me about ASUS RAID drivers and Linux support..... The Gigabyte so far has had only one problem - that side speaker driver thing. I think this ranks as the least amount of problems on any motherboard upgrade I have ever done. My last Gigabyte had a more anoying problem is why it didn't rank higher - it had dual BIOS's and the system treated them sperately. WHen one shut off, they other started, meaning you had to shut your system off twice. This new one has dual BIOS's and doesn't have that issue. It works properly as a backup.

As always, just my 2 cents.

-S

[Zachstar]

I just reenabled my C-media card (I had it disabled so I could use the Realtek for an analog 7.1 setup)

Works great in Win 7. Just note that you need to do the settings right and that it detects when things are plugged in.

[Reece]

Thanks for the heads up Subman1, my top was always ASUS followed by Gigabyte, will have to take your view into consideration on my next buy, though I will probably post here before making a decision when the time comes!

[Zachstar]

This is the chipset with Dolby Digital Live

http://www.cmedia.com.tw/pci_cmI8768_plus.html

Personally I have had little success with dolby live. Maybe you will have a better experience tho. I do plan to test DTS Connect soon.