Still got a X-Fi Xtreme from 2006 in my old editing rig needed a standalone 3.5mm input, and a X-Fi Titanium from 2008 in my Threadripper for the extra optical/toslink. They even got driver support on Win10.
Basic Windows driver support? Or the custom Creative driver suite? Because I use a Creative SB Z, and while there are WIn10 drivers available, they are not made that well (basically the original Windows 7-Style drivers with fixed compatibility). They are from 2015 which is far too old considering the card was sold for a very long time. It was only last year that Creative updated it. (Fun fact: With basically the same card + RGB + the same driver with a new skin as far as I can tell)
I got a Fatal1ty Pro titanium PCI-E and yeah, it does have a 2016 driver for Windows 10 listed. I miss that card for those juicy effects and crystalizer. time to find it and pop it in.
Went with stand alone amp dac for headphone. Way better than anything onboard or even these add in cards. No hw acceleration needed. Modern pcs handle sound just fine. Wonder how good ps5 sound will be with ray traced stuff.
The moment you turned on EAX on Doom 3 my jaw dropped! I have never heard the game like that and I used to play it with surround sound speakers and thought that was the coolest thing ever until...this...you say there is a way to emulate EAX support...so need to try that.
Shoot just looked up emulating EAX and apparently the closest thing to it doesn't have any real effect on the games when enabled other then making it think it's available when it's not. Oh well...someday.
A few games work great with emulated EAX capabilities, like Halo, F.E.A.R. and Call of Duty 2, but DOOM 3, Quake 4 and Prey are especially picky with EAX capabilities because they use OpenAL and not DirectSound like the previously mentioned games. MAYBE they can be emulated, but I'm not sure how can that be done.
OpenAL should actually work better on newer OS' than DirectSound. You won't get hardware acceleration of 3D positional audio but in theory using ALchemy software (Or the inbuilt GX stuff if you have an ASUS Xonar/OxygenHD based card) you can still get the full "support" for EAX...And honestly, even the older quad cores like LGR used in this XP build have enough processing power spare to do the positional audio without hardware acceleration while gaming. It's worth looking into. It's like if you could still get all of the features of say, UTs Glide renderer while using software rendering except you're also running it on a 4Ghz modern CPU so there's zero real difference between the hardware acceleration and just doing it via software in theory.
@@JayBmusic I tried that and it didn't work, there was no sound. So, I installed EAX4Unified, then normal Creative Alchemy, then patched it so it works with my integrated chip and it work perfectly. Also, Alchemy Universal is based on an much older version of Alchemy.
Very nice! That large connector at the back, you can use it for connecting one of these SPDIF rear IO brackets if you lost, or don't have the drive bay device. I use this for digital capturing, makes my life a bit easier :) A few games I can recommend to experience X-Fi cards, especially with headphones and CMSS-3D enabled are BF 2142, F.E.A.R. and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory.
F.E.A.R. is great so is Prey and Quake 4 which use the x-ram. I had this card up until I could no longer get it to function in Windows 10 no matter what I did. Wished I had hung on to it and just did a Xp build for my MID 2000's gaming madness.
Old Liquid Can't relate to any of your issues with the sound. The USB input issue is well documented though and the fix is easy, just place a DLL file into the game folder.
I can't even begin to tell you how much i've waited for LGR episodes that covered Creative's Audigy/X-Fi sound cards! Thanks! I own the X-Fi Fatal1ty XtremeGamer+frontal bay, and the X-Fi XtremeMusic+Elite Pro breakout box, coupled with Inspire 5.1/Inspire 7.1 speakers respectively, since 2008. I still use it to this day and age, wouldn't change them for nothing! It's a shame that modern cards doesn't do DTS/AC3 no more, AFAIK.
That CMSS-3D thing is actually rather impressive on standard stereo headphones(AKG K271), even when just watching this video. Closed my eyes and it was spot on. Literally 100% convincing. So i don't think it was made for speakers, but rather headphones. I had the X-Fi too ages ago but i didn't notice any benefit with that on my speakers compared to game-specific software 3D-audio "emulation."
I got my Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD working too, EAX works great still. You can also set your speakers to 5.1 in windows with physical stereo speakers or headphones and CMSS - 3D works better than virtual 3D
@@JediJado I love the fact that the card still has an optical audio input as well as output ports. I run my Console through the optical in and then I can use my headphones and all the SoundBlaster processing on my console games as well =) It's actually really hard to find a sound card with optical in these days. I think the newest RGB SoundBlaster has an input, however it's a shared input/output port. So you only get one =/
I did have to replace my XtremeGamer, One of the caps failed and was giving me horrible distorted sound... I still have it but the on board audio on my Motherboard has DEDICATED Hardware Sound Card on it anyway.
If you want a big upgrade look at importing an Onkyo WAVIO 300 SE from japan, they use the X-fi chip while having its own headphone amp as well as some of the best audio hardware of the time, two dacs per channel and fully shielded and separated analog from digital components
Do the drivers work on Win10? It kinda stopped working after Windows 7, and it was too much of a hassle to get it working. I really miss having all those options when listening to music.
I had a X-Fi card, minus the bay interface, but it was awesome. I always loved the 'What U Hear' feature where I could record audio from TH-cam videos (music mainly) and such. Very cool. Also when you showed the 8800s, pretty sure I had one of those branded ones too - I definitely had that headset you showed though. Ah the memories, can always rely on LGR for that nostalgia kick.
@@markmckeown87 Nothing quite like the first time you found a new feature on your PC eh? My dad bought me a chipped Xbox in 2005 loaded with an interface which was full of a bunch of emulators and strange homebrew games and stuff, I spent hours inspecting every single thing in there. One featured a puzzle game where you had to make it back to the start by moving across tiles in a certain pattern, once you moved onto the next tile the previous one fell down, and the final level of that game took me 3 weeks to crack and I'm pretty talented at stuff like that, I still think its creator must've been a mad genius lol
I love anything you do on soundcards, I feel like the development of sound in the PC space gets largely overlooked when compared to the soundchips of consoles and things like that, and I for some reason find more modern soundcards to be equally fascinating. Thanks for posting!
it's almost like the development of everything at least as far as PC gaming goes doesn't actually matter in the grand scheme of things anyways.. I could care less about the hardware, we lost sound to the PS3, and we lost level design to the Xbox.. and as long as that controller exists like it's existed for so long, we are never going to actually see any improvement, although apparently we did get improved sound so.. it's I guess it's too bad the entire generation of developers right now grew up with garbage audio cuz it doesn't seem to be getting any better, but the tech I guess is.. but it's also with proprietary middlware so it's a total nightmare to actually go fix... There was a time when fixing sound in a game was about the easiest mod you could do, you just had to put good sound back into it where the old sound was.. or if you were special you could really get down with anything that Carmack had his hands in, from source engine to quake even.. except for that the rage one the i-5 that was the start of proprietary Bethesda.. excuse me proprietary id.. But we lost level design to the dual analog controller, and then we lost PC gaming to the xbox, as it replaced it LOL turns out windows is run by Microsoft and as it turns out they like having a closed ecosystem go figure, they also like money so they throw bone, but there was a time when they were basically treating us like that cat that never gets fed and never gets the litter box cleaned up and on occasion gets kicked under the couch.. now it's you know shelter life, is it better I don't know.. it seems like it but it still feels like gas lighting.
Wish the audio quality for TH-cam was better. Something is lost in the compression but could definitely hear a difference. Haven’t had a dedicated sound card on my pc in a long time probably around 2006-2007 as the integrated was good enough. When I listen to music I just goto my stereo system. Loved the video and hope to see more like it especially about that other card
LGR have you thought about exporting a couple short clips to flac/wav or something similar and just throwing on google drive so we could hear the full quality for ourselves? Or would that be too much work? Think it’d probably be a good thing to do at least for videos entirely about a sound card
@@theoneanton soundblaster ae5 is the most modern one. The difference with decent headphones is huge, compared to onboard. Otherwise I can recommend the a bit older soundblaster x, not the same level, but costs less and still way better. Both also support eax on Windows 10, you need to activate the game for eax in a program that comes with the driver, also for some games the sound is bugging with eax on though.
My bad, sound blaster x ae-x. Some people also say that they zxr still sounds better, but that still costs way more and the sound is already awesome. Also don't use the bass option in the driver, change the bass frequencies in the Equalizer instead.
I don't think I've said it before, but in case I haven't: thank you so much for curating your subtitles! There's a lot of channels out there that skip that and let TH-cam try to auto-generate them, but it's never any good! Thanks for going that extra mile in making your content even better and more accessible! (And yes, I realize the sort of irony in mentioning that on a video about a sound card!)
I remember my dad and I installing a sound blaster in our 1st home PC ever so that we could hear the voices in Diablo 1. Hearing the Butcher's iconic fresh meat line for the 1st time scared the crap out of me as a child, and it take really takes me back.
I had similar experience with my step dad. We added Yamaha OPL3SA sound card just to hear Doom 2 on our 486 computer. The first time I heard Doom 2, I was in shock and so damn excited lol.
Were you using the stock drivers or the Daniel K drivers? I too had a situation where it was like bit rot going on with the stock driver from Creative, but the Daniel K drivers fixed that; the only time it ever stops working on my build is whenever Windows 10 did a major enough udpate and it chooses to uninstall because "it's not a signed driver" like the Creative one would be.
I am on the X-Fi and Daniel_k drivers too. Its been all swell apart from audio crackling and degradation when playing the Forza Horizon 4 demo. Only fix I can see is maybe Windows update drivers or plugging in another USB audio card for the meantime.
Oh these XP machine videos are sweet. All of this hardware is pretty much the step up versions of everything I had in my first custom built PC in 2007. I had an e6850, you got a qx6850. You have dual 8800 gts, I had dual 8600gts, and now you have the xfi platinum I had the xfi xtreme music. This is a great nostalgia trip. I remember fiddling with that soundblaster UI constantly as it always loved to randomly mute my mic in and never save my balancing settings. Still it made me fall in love with dynamic compression and I can never get a motherboard without a integrated sound chip that supports it.
This reminded me of my XP Dell Dimension build, back in the day, with a Soundblaster Live! Card, connected to 5.1 Altec Lansing speakers. Man , nostalgia just hit me hard.
I used to have the five speaker setup and it was amazing. Then I had kiddos and couldn’t really use the speakers anymore...especially playing games like GTA where the F bomb is dropped every 10 secs or so 😂
It seems that due to the way Windows after Vista deals with sound, there is no longer direct access to sound card via DirectSound. That means the sound card is no more than a DAC. What a waste of the 51 million transistors in the EMU chip.
I still have this same card, front panel, and remote laying around somewhere! X-Fi Crystallizer was genuinely a very cool feature, I used it for many years across a few generations of X-Fi cards - and I believe some of the earlier non-X-Fi cards had the feature too, and it was actually the feature that lead to the development of their X-Fi ASIC... Anyhow, it was a genuinely nice-sounding feature, not just a stupid filter or sharpening effect. It was especially nice on low bitrate MP3's and such, which was a lot more common in those days, back when internet connections were slow, and storage was premium. But even on high-quality sources, the crystallizer really worked well, if left on a low-to-medium setting. It genuinely added dynamic range without causing it to sound crunchy or boomy. Very impressive. Turning it on kinda felt like having your hearing restored after unknowingly having slowly gone deaf! Was not a big fan of the 3D feature though. It worked, especially with good headphones, but it altered the sound way too much to be worth it, except for competitive FPS or something like that. I used it for competitive CS, the positional audio was extremely good. Screw these dumb "7.1 headphones" they're trying to sell people nowadays... Pro tip; *you only have two earholes* , it's not about how many speakers you have, it's about how the audio frequencies are modulated. I kinda miss sound cards being relevant, but just like you said in the video, these days, built-in audio is very good, the issues with coupled noise from the rest of the motherboard has been solved by separating the ground planes, and the DACs + OP-Amps they use are just as high-end as what any sound card or external DAC uses. If you really want placebo levels of quality, an actual USB DAC is the way to go anyway. But then you risk audio latency instead since they're usually tailored for entertainment, where adding a couple tens or sometimes hundreds of millisec to the audio is not a huge deal.
These Soundblasters are decent audio interfaces for making music in "beyond" studio quality, seriously, i got an Audigy ZS 2 with front panel and it does hardware acceleration on 96khz or to totally freak out with 192khz... And all this works absolutely fine on Windows 10 using the XP drivers
Clint you should cover (or maybe you already have?) your current generation sound set up. I'd be interested in seeing what you use for modern games since I'm looking into more dedicated sound myself.
I have a SoundBlaster Audigy 2ZS Platinum Pro. I bought it when released to record several friends' music. They rejected Computer recording. 1.5 years later, they were diving head-first into digital recording, mixing/mastering. My $350+ SoundBlaster has never been utilized. I take solace in the fact they played music I hated.
I know a local pc store that now sells old x-fi cards on their legacy bargin counter for 10-15$ now. These cards are missing the front IO bay of course though.
Lassi Kinnunen you described them perfectly! They're all into hippie "jam band" music, so there was no convincing them (computers are for techno/pretend musicians). No digital mixing boards! Then (it hurts to use this word) GarageBand happened. Some still use it, or other software like it, just dragging & dropping pre-made loops- but the most talented friend now has a beefy pro-tools setup. I razz them sometimes "Remember when I tried to tell you that recording, multitracking, effects, mixing/mastering could all be done on your computers but you didn't consider that as a "valid" way to make music?" I love all these guys and gals, known them 20 years! But if they'd have listened to me, they'd be past drag'n'drop "insta-songs." I listen to a lot of electronic music, and they don't, but I think they assumed to use a computer for music was only useful for techno! But we all know that's not the case :) Thanks for replying all of you guys! I've found a TH-cam comment section that isn't full of jerks! 👍✌️🐒
I still have and use my Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty on my current Windows 10 Gaming PC. Never had the front panel for it. But wish I did. Love this card! Thought about upgrading. But I use and need the Optical In port.
Me too! The CMSS 3D headphone surround is still exceptional. I recently purchased an SBX AE-5 to compare and the software controls were an inefficient RGB dumpster fire compared to the X-Fi so I returned it.
If you want a big upgrade look at importing an Onkyo WAVIO 300 SE from japan, they use the X-fi chip while having its own headphone amp as well as some of the best audio hardware of the time, two dacs per channel and fully shielded and separated analog from digital components
Yeah, that front panel won't work in anything but Windows XP, because you know it has such amazing proprietary tech in it that Creative wouldn't dare release specs for it. :x
@@Darkleaf-MusicI’m running XP. I cannot get the front panel working. Is there special software I need to install or some software setting to enable? I’ve double checked the ribbon cable and it’s installed correctly.
There is no way I'd ever risk water cooling on retro components. Newer i7 stuff? Yeah sure. There are less vintage Pentiums in existence on this planet every passing day.
oh boy 2007......the ol family e machines that was just good enough for the internet and youtube.....and hope and dreams of owning a ps3 as at that time pc gaming was something i knew nothing of sadly
I use one of this cards still today. My main computer is somewhat between 8 and 10 years old except for the 1060 in it. Quad-Core Xeon as the desktop Quad-Core processors weren't available that date and later had the same price but lower cache and less features, 8 gigs of ram and my X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional (The one with the black cover without the front panel). The CPU is too slow sometimes for modern games but this is my main computer for gaming. I bought this sound card to not have interference with other chips making awful noises like hearing hard drive activity in your speakers. Attached is a Logitech Z5500 via optical SPDIF using DTS. The sound is crystal clear and EAX in games rocked hard. You can pull up the volume to max without having any noise at all except it would hurt your ears when sound comes up. Watching bluerays on this setup gives my neighbors the creeps when something blows up :-). I'm not sure if the next computer will have a dedicated sound card anymore. I'd like to have one but I'd also like to build a Mini-ITX sized watercooled one and there is just enough space for the graphics card, not for any other card. Also creative never had proper linux SPDIF support (AFAIR they promised to have) and drivers had more and more problems as soon as a newer Windows version popped up. And today I mostly use headphones and the Z5500 is connected to the TV. It felt strange to see the Sound UI on your channel where normally most of the content is nostalgic. Except for some issues the card runs fine on Win10. For example after hibernate I have hit the reset button in sound properties and enable DTS again to have sound on optical fiber. And some years ago I've been playing around using different sound fonts. I wanted games like Transport Tycoon to sound awesome when playing MIDI Music :-) But I can't remember if I succeeded.
I'm literally using this card (with interface!) as I type this! It works just fine with Windows 10 and it works great for music production, provided you can fight with drivers.
Since I was a child,I had sound blaster cards in my computers.2.0 in my 286,Pro 2.0 in my 486(to hear the the monsters from doom from left or right was mesmerizing!) ,and vibra 16,AWE64,live 4.1 and 5.1,audigy 2ZS and the same card as you featured in this review,the fatality x-fi.I know that many people hate Creative,but for me,the first time that I heard the sound fx on space ace 2 on my 286 and record voices with the voxkit program,I falled in love with the sound blasters.in 98 when Half Life 1 released,I was amazed with the EAX effects..especially on the test chamber part.now I have Sound BlasterX AE-5 and I love it.thank you for your review.
Hardware (Alchemy, software EAX, misses lots of nuances and other details) EAX was so fantastic... 10:25 , I miss it so much. I still have a bunch of Creative Sound Blaster cards, including this one. Will plan to build a retro PC soon.
I was watching your old LGR thrifts and saw you've been to Chicago in the past. If you are going to be in the Chicago area again you should check out the store "2nd and Charles" in Naperville. It's a bit like half Price books. Very awesome. Just looked it up and there are a few in North Carolina as well. You should stop by one if you get the chance. Keep up the awesome videos!
One of my favorite uses of EAX is Condemned Criminal Origins. It makes a noticeable difference and in a great way. Not just reverb, but genuinely useful and cool things like fantastic sound occlusion (for example a gunshot sounds much different if there are walls or a door between the source of the shot). Really good 3D audio making it much easier to tell where a sound is coming from in 3D space and how far away it is with just headphones or even my old but still fantastic Logitech z 2300. I'm not surprised EAX died though, creative drivers were well known to be a source of instability back in the day. Prompting Microsoft to make the changes in Vista that killed hardware accelerated audio. But Creative did a awful job trying to develop and promote their own API for it called OpenAL. And now it seems the future of hardware accelerated audio is going to be accelerated by the GPU using ray traced audio. This is one reason even as a PC gamer I'm actually quite excited to see Sony putting so much focus into game audio with the PS5. Game audio has not gotten much attention in a long time.
It is absolutely true I have exactly the same sound card with an extra external panel connector, play games on Windows XP, 7, 8, and 10. the surround sound and sound stage like shooting in the cave and outside found best in Windows XP the hardware acceleration was incredible Windows destroyed that in the next Windows edition now all sound cards sound the same.
Yes! I had one of these without the drive bay thing. My mobo integrated audio was terrible with directional sound being non existent. What a step up this was. Also, I still use the Fatal1ty headset. It was on sale at one time for $10 so I bought 4 of them. They've been slowly breaking but still so good. Love the removable mic
The newer sound blasters are badass too I'm rocking an Ae9 which is expensive but it's a happy mix absolute premium audio and an XLR mixer with +48v I feel like sound card should make a comeback because they are so awesome and having all your expansion slots filled up is also satisfying
I remember having Audigy 2 ZS back in my XP days. Moving to Vista broke a lot of the EAX stuff even for EAX games due to the change in HAL for Audio. They did release a patch called Alchemy which was meant to "fix" this for certain games but it was very hit and miss. By that period, many multi platform games were also being released on Xbox 360 and PS3, which meant preference for Dolby Digital Live over EAX. To add to PhilsComputerLab comment, I can also add some games which sounded amazing in EAX: Serious Sam 1 and 2 (although only EAX 2.0 it uses environmental echos very well) GTA 3, Vice City & San Andreas Hitman 2 & Contracts Soldier of Fortune II Double Helix - this one in particular used spacial sound and environments to a very good degree... Far Cry Crysis Even Sega Rally 2 I never got an X-Fi but would be interested to see if the 3D MIDI extends to DOS games which use General MIDI such as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D and Heretic. I remember managing to get the Audigy 2's MIDI to work in those and it sounded cleaner than Microsoft's GS Wavetable Synth. But would be interesting to see if you plugged in some 5.1 speakers to see if the MIDI instruments would be panned around you - certainly would bring an interesting lease of life to old DOS games. 3D MIDI Would have also made a brilliant baseline for the PS3 version of Doom 1 and 2 where, disappointingly, despite using Dolby Digital for sound effects, the music was a straight export of the MIDI soundtrack from Microsoft's GS Wavetable Synth to a wave file
@@HarGabt Nah, it's because San Andreas was a horrible PC port. Half-Life and CS1.6 had their hardware acceleration support removed in 2013. Use MetaAudio to restore EAX and HRTF properly in those games.
@@IDrinkLava Some time later i tried to experiment with EAX to find where it would actually work And i found that EAX works only in underwater and in stadium, but it sounds so faint, i had to turn "Enable EAX Effects" to +12db to hear the EAX working. And there's another thing you have mentioned in one of your videos: resampling issue. For some reason, Creative's ALchemy instead of linear resampling uses bsinc24 or any another that sounds worse than linear. I tried using DSOAL, but i had an issue: when i turn the camera, the sound location changes. For example, if i turn the camera somewhere else, then all sounds including menu will sound from left or right. Maybe GTA SA is incompatible with DSOAL, i dunno. What do you think about it?
Man, 2007.. what a year. Miss those days. Back in 07 I had a CREATIVE X-FI XtremeGamer FATAL1TY PRO coupled with a Logitech X-540 5.1 surround sound system. The speakers I am STILL using on my machine TO THIS DAY. Just need to solder in a new potentiometer for the speakers.
Actually EMU20K1 chipset hardware itself still got potential improvement by developing software and new drivers that support windows 10. But creative seem too aggressive to keep on moving with much more expensive sound card whereby it can't sell at all in nowadays. They should sell their oldest chip to integrated into nowadays motherboard
Oh god I loved Battlefield 2 so much! I had so much fun with the online multiplayer. I loved how in the tutorial you would have a grizzled veteran narrate the controls to you.
I loved my SB Audigy 2 Platinum back in the day! I remember I bought a hardware DVD Decoder card and in order to get audio, I had to run the RCA SPIDF from the card to the input on the front panel. I was getting 4.1 surround with my Cambridge Soundworks speakers. Man, I miss that old rig. Now I gotta build a vintage gaming PC of my own. Well played sir.... Well played.
I feel like back then, people cared more about audio. In a new golden age of PC gaming--where everyone is trying to find new things to spend money on--why isn't discrete/hardware accelerated audio more of a thing?
Feels like im back to my teenage when i was an aspiring musician and had made my first computer with a sound blaster live platinum card... It was amazing i had spdif, midi io, mic in, line in etc... It was super helpful... I remember creating sound fonts too to use with cakewalk
I had this exact x-fi pack and it's biggest flaw was the terrible drivers, especially when moving to Win 7. I paid a lot of money for it and it never worked propery, especially the front port. God dammit Creative 😐
@@Imgema I tried everything believe me. The forums of the time were packed with disgruntled X-fi owners. XP 32bit wasn't too bad but Win 7 was a disaster. Creative just gave up on developing the drivers properly. I even RMA'd my card and got the latest hardware revision replacement but it wasn't much better. I swore off Creative for life. 😁
My last dedicated sound card was an Audigy xfi I believe, I stopped using it arround 2011 exactly because there was no future with eax (or hardware accelerated sound for that matter) and the older games started to fail with win7, and the drivers sucked too, that and the onboard audio was "good enough" so I just rolled with it. Nostalgia factor aside, nowadays there's no reason to use a dedicated sound card, a nice dac/amp usb combo and good headphones/speakers is all you need.
I have the exact card in the video, and I couldn't agree more with you! Creative Labs products turned into total garbage after the SoundBlaster Live series, and it all comes down to the awful drivers (or lack thereof). I seem to recall a point where all the extra features were removed in a driver "update". I can pretty much forget using the front panel module, too.
I had the exact same problem, so I bought their next sound blaster "Titanium x-fi HD" and thought that I'd be set for a good while. Then they started rolling out Win10 and I switched over for a hot minute and realized that there were no support at all for it so I switched back to win7. Then I bought a new computer that came with win10 and I was thinking to just roll with the sound hardware in my motherboard since it said that it had a really good soundcard, but it was awful so I put in my Titanium and found a really lazy update for the card from Creative. It does the job but they removed some of the features, like the ability to EQ...but it works for what I need it for so it's kinda ok. I wouldn't have bought from Creative again if there were any other soundcards out there that was good enough. I loved the first Sound Blaster though...up until win7. Never used the remote, don't think I even knew what the remote was for haha. When all is said and done, screw Creative for not taking care of their costumers.
Yet the changes are still with us. Hardware accelerated sound is still a thing of the past. To think that positional audio in games was better 17 years ago is simply mind blowing.
It's probably the last sound card most gamers bought. After this Realtek got "good enough" and I'm amazed Creative is still in business but they were big in the mp3 market.
I had one of these! Not the Fatal1ty Edition, but the whole X-Fi setup with front and rear panels! I used the front panel to record music and stream midi tracks to my parents’ baby grand “pianomation” player piano! And hearing the 50-cal sniper rifle for the first time on Battlefield 2 was truly an awesome experience.
Even today there is a huge difference between stand alone sound card and on-board sound. I have an X99 board with a Realtek ALC892 Audio Codec and I regard this sound as very horrible! It's not very clear and there are interferences with the mouse movement. I upgraded my sound to ASUS Xonar Essence STX II 7.1 and - ohh boy - this sound is amazing! It's so clear and detailed - it's so awesome! OK, I use also studio headphones (Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro 250 Ohm Edition) and this combination just blows me away. I always will be using stand alone audio cards! In the past I was also a creative sound card fan! I had SoundBlaster 128, Live! 1024, Live! 5.1, X-Fi Xtreme Music and aftre that X-Fi Fatal1ty edition (the one you have, but without the front panel). I was always a fan of good sound :)
I bought an X-Fi platinum PCI in 2005, and it's part of the reason I'm still on an LGA1366 6c/12t Xeon X5675 @ 4.6GHz. I do audio creation/production/mastering and latency is key for me, which is why the PCI-E X-Fi is a no go, due to the latency issues Creative has with PCI-E. LGA1366 Xeon's still have the lowest cache-to-cache latency across all cache page modes, which means an LGA1366 Xeon with a PCI X-Fi EMU20 is STILL to this day, the lowest latency audio mastering system around.
Those XF-i's were so good! I had a Platinum back in the day. One little publicised feature is an onboard Dolby and DTS hardware decoder. You can plug your console in via optical, it'll decode the 5.1 signal in hardware and output it via 6 channels over analogue. Such a useful feature as you got the DACs on the card! I don't know cards these days that do it.
This is very fitting. I'm watching this video on what is my 2006 XP dream computer, fully kitted out wit period correct peripherals, artifacts and things. Very nice.
Oh it's nothing amazing really, but someting I drooled over at the time, when I was still little. It's a HP xw4400 workstation with a Core2Duo 6600 with 4GB RAM, Radeon X1300 GPU (kinda old and crappy for the time, but eh) fans replaced with Noctuas so it's practically silent, and a Zalman Reserator 2 cooler for the CPU and GPU. Those are not top specs even for the time, but it gives a good experience. Especially with all the right peripherals, speakers, monitors and things. It gives a pretty good illusion of it still being 2006. lol
Electricguy Nice, I actually have a XW9400 with 2x dual core Opterons. But on my XP PC I have a Core2 Duo E6300 @ 2.33GHz, 2gb RAM and 19" HP LP1965 1280x1024 monitor. I'm probably going to upgrade the CPU to a E6700 and get some GeForce 8800 series card. Here is a picture of the setup: i.imgur.com/F8B7inR.jpg
Like you, I also had a Fatal1ty Championship card way back in the day, with a black 5.25" break out box, and I loved that front panel! I don't know why (or when) I got rid of it. Probably when work sent me a dedicated rig with "good enough" onboard audio, and my own machine kicked the bucket around the same time. And now I'm on the hunt for classic X-FI cards for my retro rigs I'm slowly piecing together. PCI for my P3 rig, and PCIe for a Core 2 rig.
I'm still rocking their top model X-Fi Elite Pro. I have been moving that card into my new PC everytime i build a new one. Now its running in my i7, 16GB on Windows 10. Creative was kind enough to release Windows 10 drivers for this baby after all those years. I will cry like a baby when it dies on me. So far its still running great.
I have a SoundBlaster Z installed in my current PC. I bought a nice 5.1 surround sound system, and there was just something missing. Didn't feel as surround as I had expected. Ended up getting the Soundblaster Z, and it really improved the sound on my system. The surround sound transformed into what almost sounds like wearing headphones. I use to feel like using a simulated surround sound on headphones was the way to go to get the most accurate directional audio, but now I play with my speakers, and I can hear exactly where everything is coming from. The dedicated sound card made a huge difference!
@@jayhill2193 I had both too. Its really better, but not that much that I would everybody recommend to. Upgrade. At least with akg k550 headphones. Well virtual surround has improved allot.
I had an Audigy 2 ZS (without the panel) back in the day. It sounded so much better than integrated. I've never NOT had a creative sound card since. Currently rocking my trusty X-FI Titanium Fatal1ty Pro PCI-E card on a new Windows 10 build. Works just as good as it did when I bought it like 10 years ago..
I believe I bought one of the standard X-Fi cards when they came out (I was in university at the time) as I had a 5.1 system and I have always gone for a dedicated soundcard where I could in my machines. In fact up until my last couple of PC's, X-Fi's were my go to card (after which I got the Sound Blaster Z series, up to the ZXR I have in my current rig. Call me old fashioned but I just prefer to have a dedicated card for sound where I can :D
I'm not sure if I had a sound card in 2007, but my last card was a Sound Blaster Live! which I still adore to this day. I still want a Sound Blaster card of some kind in my next build. Thanks for this cool and informative video!
Every single one of my PCs, beginning with my 486 DX33, had a Sound Blaster card. I will put a dedicated Sound Blaster card into my PCs as long as Creative is going to make them. I also do not understand the "onboard sound is at least as good" argument. I have a cheap motherboard. The onboard sound sounds like crap, compared to Sound Blaster cards.
Oh man, I had this card and I loved it. I had a custom GM SoundFont that I put together from the best bits of other SoundFonts. The optical ports on the front were hooked up to my HiFi so I could both play audio over my 5.1 and use the DAC in my receiver to record from tapes and vinyl records. I had a MIDI keyboard plugged into the front MIDI port. My case at the time had cables coming out of the back, top and thanks to this thing the front too. Man I had a lot of fun with that rig.
The X-Fi is the SB I passed on. But got it and better in my old Azuntech Forte card. It was a better X-Fi. Congrats on your new card. bet you do love it. Not dissing the Audigy but that X-Fi is a big upgrade.
i have that EXACT card in my pc right now .. owned it since its release and still use it now on my skylake board with windows 10 with an 17 cpu .. i have never had a better card ever .. i even bought the elite xfi external unit with all the dials and full size midi on there but now on windows 10 that elite external unit just sits in the back of the draw not being used as windows damaged the driver support for that in the latest fall update . you can actually get optical 7.1 dts sound out of this card very easy indeed and it supports dolby digital hd the newer blu ray format ..the surround capability on this card is unreal and even today its amazing .. . the card xfi fatality1 championship series still lives on and beats the pants of everything .. best few hundred pound i have ever spent . creative still have some drivers for it altho the last few years its been getting worse on support as it went end of life a long time back ..
I'm probably the only person who'll say so, but the changes in the Doom 3 audio sound worse with the card in my opinion. I see what they're trying to do, but especially for something like dialogue, that reverb is excessive.
Nope, you're not alone. Watching this video on an 80W Japanese hi-fi amp from Luxman and two 40W speaker columns the size of a cupboard and it sucks. The reverb is too much.
From what I've read the addition of EAX to Doom 3 was a bit rushed and not something id wanted to add in the first place. They only did so because it was part of the settlement over the whole "Carmack's Reverse" lawsuit between id and Creative (google it for the details). Creative made an agreement with id out of court that if they licensed creatives EAX from them and implemented it into Doom 3 they would not pursue legal action so that's how EAX ended up in Doom 3. I'm pretty sure before the legal threats Carmack went out of his way to mention that Doom 3 was going to have advanced 3D audio tech built in without the need for special hardware.
Wow what a blast from the past...👍 I had the exact same setup back in the day and this video brought back so many good memories. Thank you for sharing this video with us...💯
For getting higher-quality audio with low noise, absolutely. Especially for audio editing and content production. If you're just gaming then integrated stuff is normally fine.
Better SNR or Dolby/DTS encoding if it's not supported by the integrated sound. Microsoft gimped sound card capabilities in Windows Vista and newer versions, because Creative drivers were bad and Microsoft was tired of dealing with their issues.
Maybe I never noticed this on my own setup before....but great job recording that helicopter in stereo...I heard it pan from left to center to right and back again perfectly.
@LGR You mention almost no "CONS" for this card (also for the previous creative card), it looks almost like an advertising. This video: I don't like. creative cards are known for having CONS: bad drivers, compatibility issues not solved by creative with many chipsets, not beign really compatible with features as advertised, bloated drivers/software, cheap amplifiers on very expensive soundcards, etc., etc. Since forever, since soundblaster/1/pro/16/awe32/awe64/vibra, sb live, live 5.1, 128, audigy, etc. etc. Sorry to be the pessimistic side of the tale today :)
There are still benefits to using dedicated sound cards in modern systems. For one the latest soundblaster cards have a much higher dynamic range than the best integrated RealTek HD chips, and there are some combinations of sound effects on multiple channels that come through much clearer, so it's easier to identify individual sounds, which otherwise are a slight mess on the integrated chips. Whether or not you get unwanted noise really depends on the quality of the motherboard - since it's the power regulation and signal filtering in the motherboard that usually determines if audible noise makes it into the audio output. But as always it really depends on what you do and what you play. Many console ports won't be able to fully utilize a dedicated soundcard because they're made for the very limited sound capabilities of the consoles, so they use only a few channels and rarely bother with proper spatial audio
These days for music production Focusrite offers great value plus leaves creative in the dust, as no serious music producer would use a creative card! Having said that back in their day they were pretty good and offered good value! Also I was surprised at how good Doom 3 looks I wished I had got it back in the day. Cheers
I had one of these very "Fata1ty" X-fi sound cards in my 2007 build. Funny thing is, I just found it while going through a bunch of old boxes. I missed using it so much I went out the next day and bought myself a new dedicated sound card for my current PC build to use instead of the onboard "good enough" sound. If you are still using on board sound, it is definitely worth buying a dedicated sound card. Also, watching you explaining the Creative labs sound controls, including the X-fi crystallizer, brought back some good memories :).
I enjoy these "retro build" videos or whatever you want to refer to them as. I get to have a look at hardware that I was always curious about at the time but wasn't in a position to buy and basically just skipped over as a result. I never got to scratch that itch to tinker with the stuff though, so these videos are great.
I still have that exact same card in my actual system today, running on windows 8.1 xD is the only piece of hardware that has come a long way, basically in all my systems since 2007, great video, thanks!!
Turns out, even in 2018 buying a sound card will give you a lot of benefits over using an onboard video card or your GPU to do the job. "Good enough" alright. I just bought a SoundBlaster from 2012 and holy fuck I can't believe me took this long to do so. Not only the sound quality is immensely better but it also free up resources on your CPU and GPU make games to perform better since all your audio processing is now being handled by a dedicated hardware. It totally worth getting a sound card now. They are still going strong.
Unless you're using a Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium PCI-e with Windows 10 drivers on old EAX-supported games, you will gain precisely zero performance increase. Creative cards after the X-Fi line just use software-emulated Alchemy, the exact same kind you can download for free called "Creative ALchemy Universal". All modern games use software APIs like FMOD, Wwise, or XAudio2 that are mixed entirely on CPU.
Holy shit! I had the Xtreme Audio PCIe version of that card in my first PC build in 2006. I think I still have it loose in a box around here somewhere. I never thought I would see that on LGR.
It's cool to see the XFi range again!!! I made the same call in late 2006, after buying BF2142 on launch day. Even though my SB Live! card could do good sound, upgrading to an XFi card made all the difference in 2006. Though that version of me would have been jealous of you as I never had the Fatal1ty card though, I had a cheaper XtremeGamer OEM card I picked up from a budget hardware store. Good to see BF2 again too!!! Clocked over 1000 hours in that game LOL
Still got a X-Fi Xtreme from 2006 in my old editing rig needed a standalone 3.5mm input, and a X-Fi Titanium from 2008 in my Threadripper for the extra optical/toslink. They even got driver support on Win10.
Basic Windows driver support? Or the custom Creative driver suite?
Because I use a Creative SB Z, and while there are WIn10 drivers available, they are not made that well (basically the original Windows 7-Style drivers with fixed compatibility). They are from 2015 which is far too old considering the card was sold for a very long time. It was only last year that Creative updated it. (Fun fact: With basically the same card + RGB + the same driver with a new skin as far as I can tell)
Kx drivers.
wtf Robbaz i didnt expect to see you here lol
I got a Fatal1ty Pro titanium PCI-E and yeah, it does have a 2016 driver for Windows 10 listed. I miss that card for those juicy effects and crystalizer. time to find it and pop it in.
Went with stand alone amp dac for headphone. Way better than anything onboard or even these add in cards. No hw acceleration needed. Modern pcs handle sound just fine. Wonder how good ps5 sound will be with ray traced stuff.
7:30 even through my laptop speakers that was surprisingly convincing, legit sent chills down my spine
The moment you turned on EAX on Doom 3 my jaw dropped! I have never heard the game like that and I used to play it with surround sound speakers and thought that was the coolest thing ever until...this...you say there is a way to emulate EAX support...so need to try that.
Shoot just looked up emulating EAX and apparently the closest thing to it doesn't have any real effect on the games when enabled other then making it think it's available when it's not. Oh well...someday.
A few games work great with emulated EAX capabilities, like Halo, F.E.A.R. and Call of Duty 2, but DOOM 3, Quake 4 and Prey are especially picky with EAX capabilities because they use OpenAL and not DirectSound like the previously mentioned games. MAYBE they can be emulated, but I'm not sure how can that be done.
OpenAL should actually work better on newer OS' than DirectSound. You won't get hardware acceleration of 3D positional audio but in theory using ALchemy software (Or the inbuilt GX stuff if you have an ASUS Xonar/OxygenHD based card) you can still get the full "support" for EAX...And honestly, even the older quad cores like LGR used in this XP build have enough processing power spare to do the positional audio without hardware acceleration while gaming. It's worth looking into.
It's like if you could still get all of the features of say, UTs Glide renderer while using software rendering except you're also running it on a 4Ghz modern CPU so there's zero real difference between the hardware acceleration and just doing it via software in theory.
Google for ALchemy Universal. It's software emulation and probably pretty loud, but better than no EAX.
@@JayBmusic I tried that and it didn't work, there was no sound. So, I installed EAX4Unified, then normal Creative Alchemy, then patched it so it works with my integrated chip and it work perfectly. Also, Alchemy Universal is based on an much older version of Alchemy.
That 3D audio approximating is really surprisingly good. Soundcards from this era were such a treat!
Very nice! That large connector at the back, you can use it for connecting one of these SPDIF rear IO brackets if you lost, or don't have the drive bay device. I use this for digital capturing, makes my life a bit easier :) A few games I can recommend to experience X-Fi cards, especially with headphones and CMSS-3D enabled are BF 2142, F.E.A.R. and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory.
F.E.A.R. is great so is Prey and Quake 4 which use the x-ram. I had this card up until I could no longer get it to function in Windows 10 no matter what I did. Wished I had hung on to it and just did a Xp build for my MID 2000's gaming madness.
I now use a Sound BlasterX AE-5, and while it does a good job there are some minor noticeable audio glitches in some EAX 4-5 games.
The nice thing about the card, is that it has EAX backwards compatibility. The card can do EAX 1-4, as well as 5, of course.
Old Liquid I’ve never had any of those problems
Old Liquid Can't relate to any of your issues with the sound. The USB input issue is well documented though and the fix is easy, just place a DLL file into the game folder.
I can't even begin to tell you how much i've waited for LGR episodes that covered Creative's Audigy/X-Fi sound cards! Thanks! I own the X-Fi Fatal1ty XtremeGamer+frontal bay, and the X-Fi XtremeMusic+Elite Pro breakout box, coupled with Inspire 5.1/Inspire 7.1 speakers respectively, since 2008. I still use it to this day and age, wouldn't change them for nothing! It's a shame that modern cards doesn't do DTS/AC3 no more, AFAIK.
That CMSS-3D thing is actually rather impressive on standard stereo headphones(AKG K271), even when just watching this video. Closed my eyes and it was spot on. Literally 100% convincing.
So i don't think it was made for speakers, but rather headphones. I had the X-Fi too ages ago but i didn't notice any benefit with that on my speakers compared to game-specific software 3D-audio "emulation."
I am still using a Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium in my current rig under windows 10 =)
been using creative for 14yrs now have a soundblaster Z, dont feel at moment i need to change as on board is still fairly generic and cheap.
William J Beard does EAX Work lol
I got my Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD working too, EAX works great still. You can also set your speakers to 5.1 in windows with physical stereo speakers or headphones and CMSS - 3D works better than virtual 3D
@@JediJado I love the fact that the card still has an optical audio input as well as output ports. I run my Console through the optical in and then I can use my headphones and all the SoundBlaster processing on my console games as well =) It's actually really hard to find a sound card with optical in these days. I think the newest RGB SoundBlaster has an input, however it's a shared input/output port. So you only get one =/
I'm using an Audigy 2 under windows 10 :D
Still using this card today (X-Fi Titanium, PCIe though). Had no reason to change the card or using onboard-sound.
Brother!
I did have to replace my XtremeGamer, One of the caps failed and was giving me horrible distorted sound... I still have it but the on board audio on my Motherboard has DEDICATED Hardware Sound Card on it anyway.
If you want a big upgrade look at importing an Onkyo WAVIO 300 SE from japan, they use the X-fi chip while having its own headphone amp as well as some of the best audio hardware of the time, two dacs per channel and fully shielded and separated analog from digital components
Yeah, PCI X-Fi since 2008 - originated from Core 2 machine that went throught all the years to 2016. Now it's running in Skylake-based machine :D
Do the drivers work on Win10? It kinda stopped working after Windows 7, and it was too much of a hassle to get it working. I really miss having all those options when listening to music.
I was an audio beta tester back in the day for C-Lab from 03-08. Loved the trip back down memory lane. Thank you sir!
I had a X-Fi card, minus the bay interface, but it was awesome. I always loved the 'What U Hear' feature where I could record audio from TH-cam videos (music mainly) and such. Very cool. Also when you showed the 8800s, pretty sure I had one of those branded ones too - I definitely had that headset you showed though.
Ah the memories, can always rely on LGR for that nostalgia kick.
Brother, check for disabled recording devices or whatever. You'll probably see "Stereo Mix" which records what you hear.
I use it quite often.
Oh yes it still exists in that form, but this was the first time I'd used it, about 14 years ago, and it was awesome lol
@@markmckeown87 Nothing quite like the first time you found a new feature on your PC eh? My dad bought me a chipped Xbox in 2005 loaded with an interface which was full of a bunch of emulators and strange homebrew games and stuff, I spent hours inspecting every single thing in there.
One featured a puzzle game where you had to make it back to the start by moving across tiles in a certain pattern, once you moved onto the next tile the previous one fell down, and the final level of that game took me 3 weeks to crack and I'm pretty talented at stuff like that, I still think its creator must've been a mad genius lol
I love anything you do on soundcards, I feel like the development of sound in the PC space gets largely overlooked when compared to the soundchips of consoles and things like that, and I for some reason find more modern soundcards to be equally fascinating. Thanks for posting!
it's almost like the development of everything at least as far as PC gaming goes doesn't actually matter in the grand scheme of things anyways.. I could care less about the hardware, we lost sound to the PS3, and we lost level design to the Xbox.. and as long as that controller exists like it's existed for so long, we are never going to actually see any improvement, although apparently we did get improved sound so.. it's I guess it's too bad the entire generation of developers right now grew up with garbage audio cuz it doesn't seem to be getting any better, but the tech I guess is.. but it's also with proprietary middlware so it's a total nightmare to actually go fix... There was a time when fixing sound in a game was about the easiest mod you could do, you just had to put good sound back into it where the old sound was.. or if you were special you could really get down with anything that Carmack had his hands in, from source engine to quake even.. except for that the rage one the i-5 that was the start of proprietary Bethesda.. excuse me proprietary id..
But we lost level design to the dual analog controller, and then we lost PC gaming to the xbox, as it replaced it LOL turns out windows is run by Microsoft and as it turns out they like having a closed ecosystem go figure, they also like money so they throw bone, but there was a time when they were basically treating us like that cat that never gets fed and never gets the litter box cleaned up and on occasion gets kicked under the couch.. now it's you know shelter life, is it better I don't know.. it seems like it but it still feels like gas lighting.
@@jakedill1304 nice comment
@@jakedill1304 I want what you're smoking
Wish the audio quality for TH-cam was better. Something is lost in the compression but could definitely hear a difference. Haven’t had a dedicated sound card on my pc in a long time probably around 2006-2007 as the integrated was good enough. When I listen to music I just goto my stereo system. Loved the video and hope to see more like it especially about that other card
Indeed, I wish TH-cam had an option to play back in the full quality I uploaded. But playing in 4K gives you a really close approximation at least :)
LGR have you thought about exporting a couple short clips to flac/wav or something similar and just throwing on google drive so we could hear the full quality for ourselves? Or would that be too much work? Think it’d probably be a good thing to do at least for videos entirely about a sound card
What dedicated sound cards are there in 2018?
@@theoneanton soundblaster ae5 is the most modern one. The difference with decent headphones is huge, compared to onboard. Otherwise I can recommend the a bit older soundblaster x, not the same level, but costs less and still way better. Both also support eax on Windows 10, you need to activate the game for eax in a program that comes with the driver, also for some games the sound is bugging with eax on though.
My bad, sound blaster x ae-x. Some people also say that they zxr still sounds better, but that still costs way more and the sound is already awesome. Also don't use the bass option in the driver, change the bass frequencies in the Equalizer instead.
I don't think I've said it before, but in case I haven't: thank you so much for curating your subtitles! There's a lot of channels out there that skip that and let TH-cam try to auto-generate them, but it's never any good! Thanks for going that extra mile in making your content even better and more accessible!
(And yes, I realize the sort of irony in mentioning that on a video about a sound card!)
I always look forward to these episodes! Thank you so much, LGR for this Thing.
Dont forget the OCZ Fatal1ty edition RAM kit
I remember my dad and I installing a sound blaster in our 1st home PC ever so that we could hear the voices in Diablo 1. Hearing the Butcher's iconic fresh meat line for the 1st time scared the crap out of me as a child, and it take really takes me back.
I had similar experience with my step dad. We added Yamaha OPL3SA sound card just to hear Doom 2 on our 486 computer. The first time I heard Doom 2, I was in shock and so damn excited lol.
The Logitech speakers you had in '07, I still use to this day.
#XFiTillIDie
Xfi + Daniel K drivers on windows 10 is a thing of beauty for current games, too.
Jorge Ramos when I use my Audigy 2 zs under 10 I just use the 7 64-bit drivers.
Really I had so many issues with my X-Fi Forte even on W7...
Were you using the stock drivers or the Daniel K drivers? I too had a situation where it was like bit rot going on with the stock driver from Creative, but the Daniel K drivers fixed that; the only time it ever stops working on my build is whenever Windows 10 did a major enough udpate and it chooses to uninstall because "it's not a signed driver" like the Creative one would be.
I am on the X-Fi and Daniel_k drivers too. Its been all swell apart from audio crackling and degradation when playing the Forza Horizon 4 demo. Only fix I can see is maybe Windows update drivers or plugging in another USB audio card for the meantime.
After Auzentch went bankrupt and stopped updating drivers I started using Daniel K's ones with mixed results.
By the way I was on W7 on that pc.
Oh these XP machine videos are sweet. All of this hardware is pretty much the step up versions of everything I had in my first custom built PC in 2007. I had an e6850, you got a qx6850. You have dual 8800 gts, I had dual 8600gts, and now you have the xfi platinum I had the xfi xtreme music. This is a great nostalgia trip. I remember fiddling with that soundblaster UI constantly as it always loved to randomly mute my mic in and never save my balancing settings. Still it made me fall in love with dynamic compression and I can never get a motherboard without a integrated sound chip that supports it.
This reminded me of my XP Dell Dimension build, back in the day, with a Soundblaster Live! Card, connected to 5.1 Altec Lansing speakers. Man , nostalgia just hit me hard.
was it the double bass woofer? I've got that subwoofer for a pair of small Canton plus S. they are a good match
I used to have the five speaker setup and it was amazing. Then I had kiddos and couldn’t really use the speakers anymore...especially playing games like GTA where the F bomb is dropped every 10 secs or so 😂
It seems that due to the way Windows after Vista deals with sound, there is no longer direct access to sound card via DirectSound. That means the sound card is no more than a DAC. What a waste of the 51 million transistors in the EMU chip.
Oh my, memories! I had one of these back in the days and man, many games sounded better than today's! Great video as always! 👍🏼
I still have this same card, front panel, and remote laying around somewhere! X-Fi Crystallizer was genuinely a very cool feature, I used it for many years across a few generations of X-Fi cards - and I believe some of the earlier non-X-Fi cards had the feature too, and it was actually the feature that lead to the development of their X-Fi ASIC... Anyhow, it was a genuinely nice-sounding feature, not just a stupid filter or sharpening effect. It was especially nice on low bitrate MP3's and such, which was a lot more common in those days, back when internet connections were slow, and storage was premium. But even on high-quality sources, the crystallizer really worked well, if left on a low-to-medium setting. It genuinely added dynamic range without causing it to sound crunchy or boomy. Very impressive. Turning it on kinda felt like having your hearing restored after unknowingly having slowly gone deaf!
Was not a big fan of the 3D feature though. It worked, especially with good headphones, but it altered the sound way too much to be worth it, except for competitive FPS or something like that. I used it for competitive CS, the positional audio was extremely good. Screw these dumb "7.1 headphones" they're trying to sell people nowadays... Pro tip; *you only have two earholes* , it's not about how many speakers you have, it's about how the audio frequencies are modulated.
I kinda miss sound cards being relevant, but just like you said in the video, these days, built-in audio is very good, the issues with coupled noise from the rest of the motherboard has been solved by separating the ground planes, and the DACs + OP-Amps they use are just as high-end as what any sound card or external DAC uses. If you really want placebo levels of quality, an actual USB DAC is the way to go anyway. But then you risk audio latency instead since they're usually tailored for entertainment, where adding a couple tens or sometimes hundreds of millisec to the audio is not a huge deal.
These Soundblasters are decent audio interfaces for making music in "beyond" studio quality, seriously, i got an Audigy ZS 2 with front panel and it does hardware acceleration on 96khz or to totally freak out with 192khz... And all this works absolutely fine on Windows 10 using the XP drivers
Clint you should cover (or maybe you already have?) your current generation sound set up. I'd be interested in seeing what you use for modern games since I'm looking into more dedicated sound myself.
I have a SoundBlaster Audigy 2ZS Platinum Pro. I bought it when released to record several friends' music. They rejected Computer recording. 1.5 years later, they were diving head-first into digital recording, mixing/mastering. My $350+ SoundBlaster has never been utilized. I take solace in the fact they played music I hated.
That's still computer recording... unless they are using a digital multi-track recorder.
That's nice of you to record your friends music for them
I know a local pc store that now sells old x-fi cards on their legacy bargin counter for 10-15$ now. These cards are missing the front IO bay of course though.
Thomas Thank you! Mine doesn't have the front bay, but rather the external I/O. It's still a potent card for most uses! :)
Lassi Kinnunen you described them perfectly! They're all into hippie "jam band" music, so there was no convincing them (computers are for techno/pretend musicians). No digital mixing boards!
Then (it hurts to use this word) GarageBand happened. Some still use it, or other software like it, just dragging & dropping pre-made loops- but the most talented friend now has a beefy pro-tools setup. I razz them sometimes "Remember when I tried to tell you that recording, multitracking, effects, mixing/mastering could all be done on your computers but you didn't consider that as a "valid" way to make music?"
I love all these guys and gals, known them 20 years! But if they'd have listened to me, they'd be past drag'n'drop "insta-songs."
I listen to a lot of electronic music, and they don't, but I think they assumed to use a computer for music was only useful for techno! But we all know that's not the case :)
Thanks for replying all of you guys! I've found a TH-cam comment section that isn't full of jerks! 👍✌️🐒
I bought a X-FI just for BF2 along with a 7800GT. I loved that game.
I still have and use my Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty on my current Windows 10 Gaming PC. Never had the front panel for it. But wish I did. Love this card! Thought about upgrading. But I use and need the Optical In port.
Me too! The CMSS 3D headphone surround is still exceptional. I recently purchased an SBX AE-5 to compare and the software controls were an inefficient RGB dumpster fire compared to the X-Fi so I returned it.
If you want a big upgrade look at importing an Onkyo WAVIO 300 SE from japan, they use the X-fi chip while having its own headphone amp as well as some of the best audio hardware of the time, two dacs per channel and fully shielded and separated analog from digital components
Yeah, that front panel won't work in anything but Windows XP, because you know it has such amazing proprietary tech in it that Creative wouldn't dare release specs for it. :x
yep Z is a must up from your, been using creative for 14rs now and now on Z not moving now till atleast 2 more yrs.
@@Darkleaf-MusicI’m running XP. I cannot get the front panel working. Is there special software I need to install or some software setting to enable? I’ve double checked the ribbon cable and it’s installed correctly.
I still use my X-Fi XtremeMusic that I bought at CompUSA in 2007
Hey uh, i think your computer is possessed, gonna need some holy water for the next upgrade
You mean some holy _watercooling_
eyyyy
There is no way I'd ever risk water cooling on retro components. Newer i7 stuff? Yeah sure. There are less vintage Pentiums in existence on this planet every passing day.
oh boy 2007......the ol family e machines that was just good enough for the internet and youtube.....and hope and dreams of owning a ps3 as at that time pc gaming was something i knew nothing of sadly
Love you stuff man. Your easy going laid back and honest commentary is a real tonic for life 😎
I use one of this cards still today. My main computer is somewhat between 8 and 10 years old except for the 1060 in it. Quad-Core Xeon as the desktop Quad-Core processors weren't available that date and later had the same price but lower cache and less features, 8 gigs of ram and my X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional (The one with the black cover without the front panel). The CPU is too slow sometimes for modern games but this is my main computer for gaming. I bought this sound card to not have interference with other chips making awful noises like hearing hard drive activity in your speakers. Attached is a Logitech Z5500 via optical SPDIF using DTS. The sound is crystal clear and EAX in games rocked hard. You can pull up the volume to max without having any noise at all except it would hurt your ears when sound comes up. Watching bluerays on this setup gives my neighbors the creeps when something blows up :-). I'm not sure if the next computer will have a dedicated sound card anymore. I'd like to have one but I'd also like to build a Mini-ITX sized watercooled one and there is just enough space for the graphics card, not for any other card. Also creative never had proper linux SPDIF support (AFAIR they promised to have) and drivers had more and more problems as soon as a newer Windows version popped up. And today I mostly use headphones and the Z5500 is connected to the TV. It felt strange to see the Sound UI on your channel where normally most of the content is nostalgic. Except for some issues the card runs fine on Win10. For example after hibernate I have hit the reset button in sound properties and enable DTS again to have sound on optical fiber. And some years ago I've been playing around using different sound fonts. I wanted games like Transport Tycoon to sound awesome when playing MIDI Music :-) But I can't remember if I succeeded.
By the way Clint - have you ever played Tropico? It might be right up your alley. And might be worthy of a entertaining LGR review ;-)
Which one?
I'm literally using this card (with interface!) as I type this! It works just fine with Windows 10 and it works great for music production, provided you can fight with drivers.
1:13 Gonna need a priest
THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!
THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!
Hail Sithis
And a change of pants.
rngesus makes his invulnerable save.
THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!
THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!
Oh, hello!
...
Sick. As a dog.
Since I was a child,I had sound blaster cards in my computers.2.0 in my 286,Pro 2.0 in my 486(to hear the the monsters from doom from left or right was mesmerizing!) ,and vibra 16,AWE64,live 4.1 and 5.1,audigy 2ZS and the same card as you featured in this review,the fatality x-fi.I know that many people hate Creative,but for me,the first time that I heard the sound fx on space ace 2 on my 286 and record voices with the voxkit program,I falled in love with the sound blasters.in 98 when Half Life 1 released,I was amazed with the EAX effects..especially on the test chamber part.now I have Sound BlasterX AE-5 and I love it.thank you for your review.
Hardware (Alchemy, software EAX, misses lots of nuances and other details) EAX was so fantastic... 10:25 , I miss it so much.
I still have a bunch of Creative Sound Blaster cards, including this one. Will plan to build a retro PC soon.
Im pretty sure the EAX emulation does that. Alchemy + X-FI Card should still do the same since they are hardware driven
I was watching your old LGR thrifts and saw you've been to Chicago in the past. If you are going to be in the Chicago area again you should check out the store "2nd and Charles" in Naperville. It's a bit like half Price books. Very awesome. Just looked it up and there are a few in North Carolina as well. You should stop by one if you get the chance. Keep up the awesome videos!
One of my favorite uses of EAX is Condemned Criminal Origins. It makes a noticeable difference and in a great way. Not just reverb, but genuinely useful and cool things like fantastic sound occlusion (for example a gunshot sounds much different if there are walls or a door between the source of the shot). Really good 3D audio making it much easier to tell where a sound is coming from in 3D space and how far away it is with just headphones or even my old but still fantastic Logitech z 2300. I'm not surprised EAX died though, creative drivers were well known to be a source of instability back in the day. Prompting Microsoft to make the changes in Vista that killed hardware accelerated audio. But Creative did a awful job trying to develop and promote their own API for it called OpenAL. And now it seems the future of hardware accelerated audio is going to be accelerated by the GPU using ray traced audio. This is one reason even as a PC gamer I'm actually quite excited to see Sony putting so much focus into game audio with the PS5. Game audio has not gotten much attention in a long time.
It is absolutely true I have exactly the same sound card with an extra external panel connector, play games on Windows XP, 7, 8, and 10. the surround sound and sound stage like shooting in the cave and outside found best in Windows XP the hardware acceleration was incredible Windows destroyed that in the next Windows edition now all sound cards sound the same.
Yes! I had one of these without the drive bay thing. My mobo integrated audio was terrible with directional sound being non existent. What a step up this was. Also, I still use the Fatal1ty headset. It was on sale at one time for $10 so I bought 4 of them. They've been slowly breaking but still so good. Love the removable mic
No canyon.mid?
Doesn't come with XP! onestop.mid is where it's at in this case ;)
LGR I have a big folder of midi files I’ve found around the internet. It has canyon.mid and even the duke nukem theme and Doom e1m1.
The newer sound blasters are badass too I'm rocking an Ae9 which is expensive but it's a happy mix absolute premium audio and an XLR mixer with +48v I feel like sound card should make a comeback because they are so awesome and having all your expansion slots filled up is also satisfying
I remember having Audigy 2 ZS back in my XP days. Moving to Vista broke a lot of the EAX stuff even for EAX games due to the change in HAL for Audio.
They did release a patch called Alchemy which was meant to "fix" this for certain games but it was very hit and miss. By that period, many multi platform games were also being released on Xbox 360 and PS3, which meant preference for Dolby Digital Live over EAX.
To add to PhilsComputerLab comment, I can also add some games which sounded amazing in EAX:
Serious Sam 1 and 2 (although only EAX 2.0 it uses environmental echos very well)
GTA 3, Vice City & San Andreas
Hitman 2 & Contracts
Soldier of Fortune II Double Helix - this one in particular used spacial sound and environments to a very good degree...
Far Cry
Crysis
Even Sega Rally 2
I never got an X-Fi but would be interested to see if the 3D MIDI extends to DOS games which use General MIDI such as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D and Heretic. I remember managing to get the Audigy 2's MIDI to work in those and it sounded cleaner than Microsoft's GS Wavetable Synth. But would be interesting to see if you plugged in some 5.1 speakers to see if the MIDI instruments would be panned around you - certainly would bring an interesting lease of life to old DOS games.
3D MIDI Would have also made a brilliant baseline for the PS3 version of Doom 1 and 2 where, disappointingly, despite using Dolby Digital for sound effects, the music was a straight export of the MIDI soundtrack from Microsoft's GS Wavetable Synth to a wave file
@@HarGabt Nah, it's because San Andreas was a horrible PC port. Half-Life and CS1.6 had their hardware acceleration support removed in 2013. Use MetaAudio to restore EAX and HRTF properly in those games.
@@IDrinkLava Some time later i tried to experiment with EAX to find where it would actually work
And i found that EAX works only in underwater and in stadium, but it sounds so faint, i had to turn "Enable EAX Effects" to +12db to hear the EAX working.
And there's another thing you have mentioned in one of your videos: resampling issue. For some reason, Creative's ALchemy instead of linear resampling uses bsinc24 or any another that sounds worse than linear. I tried using DSOAL, but i had an issue: when i turn the camera, the sound location changes. For example, if i turn the camera somewhere else, then all sounds including menu will sound from left or right. Maybe GTA SA is incompatible with DSOAL, i dunno.
What do you think about it?
Man, 2007.. what a year. Miss those days. Back in 07 I had a CREATIVE X-FI XtremeGamer FATAL1TY PRO coupled with a Logitech X-540 5.1 surround sound system. The speakers I am STILL using on my machine TO THIS DAY. Just need to solder in a new potentiometer for the speakers.
Actually EMU20K1 chipset hardware itself still got potential improvement by developing software and new drivers that support windows 10. But creative seem too aggressive to keep on moving with much more expensive sound card whereby it can't sell at all in nowadays. They should sell their oldest chip to integrated into nowadays motherboard
Oh god I loved Battlefield 2 so much! I had so much fun with the online multiplayer. I loved how in the tutorial you would have a grizzled veteran narrate the controls to you.
I LOVE the sounds of Age of Mythology!! Its a mystery to me that it never became as popular as the Age of Empires series.
I loved my SB Audigy 2 Platinum back in the day! I remember I bought a hardware DVD Decoder card and in order to get audio, I had to run the RCA SPIDF from the card to the input on the front panel. I was getting 4.1 surround with my Cambridge Soundworks speakers. Man, I miss that old rig. Now I gotta build a vintage gaming PC of my own. Well played sir.... Well played.
I feel like back then, people cared more about audio. In a new golden age of PC gaming--where everyone is trying to find new things to spend money on--why isn't discrete/hardware accelerated audio more of a thing?
Feels like im back to my teenage when i was an aspiring musician and had made my first computer with a sound blaster live platinum card... It was amazing i had spdif, midi io, mic in, line in etc... It was super helpful... I remember creating sound fonts too to use with cakewalk
I had this exact x-fi pack and it's biggest flaw was the terrible drivers, especially when moving to Win 7. I paid a lot of money for it and it never worked propery, especially the front port. God dammit Creative 😐
I'm sure it's even worse on Windows 10.
@@Imgema I tried everything believe me. The forums of the time were packed with disgruntled X-fi owners. XP 32bit wasn't too bad but Win 7 was a disaster. Creative just gave up on developing the drivers properly. I even RMA'd my card and got the latest hardware revision replacement but it wasn't much better. I swore off Creative for life. 😁
My last dedicated sound card was an Audigy xfi I believe, I stopped using it arround 2011 exactly because there was no future with eax (or hardware accelerated sound for that matter) and the older games started to fail with win7, and the drivers sucked too, that and the onboard audio was "good enough" so I just rolled with it.
Nostalgia factor aside, nowadays there's no reason to use a dedicated sound card, a nice dac/amp usb combo and good headphones/speakers is all you need.
I have the exact card in the video, and I couldn't agree more with you! Creative Labs products turned into total garbage after the SoundBlaster Live series, and it all comes down to the awful drivers (or lack thereof). I seem to recall a point where all the extra features were removed in a driver "update". I can pretty much forget using the front panel module, too.
I had the exact same problem, so I bought their next sound blaster "Titanium x-fi HD" and thought that I'd be set for a good while. Then they started rolling out Win10 and I switched over for a hot minute and realized that there were no support at all for it so I switched back to win7. Then I bought a new computer that came with win10 and I was thinking to just roll with the sound hardware in my motherboard since it said that it had a really good soundcard, but it was awful so I put in my Titanium and found a really lazy update for the card from Creative. It does the job but they removed some of the features, like the ability to EQ...but it works for what I need it for so it's kinda ok. I wouldn't have bought from Creative again if there were any other soundcards out there that was good enough. I loved the first Sound Blaster though...up until win7. Never used the remote, don't think I even knew what the remote was for haha. When all is said and done, screw Creative for not taking care of their costumers.
I had that DM2 DJ mixer when I was 15! It got me into DJing with the real stuff! Forgot the name for it before!
The X-Fi cards were certainly the pinnacle of hardware 3D audio, before Microsoft put a stop to it in Vista.
yeah but most people skipped vista
Yet the changes are still with us. Hardware accelerated sound is still a thing of the past. To think that positional audio in games was better 17 years ago is simply mind blowing.
I had an Audigy 2 in 2007. I had bought it around 2003.
2020 and Im still using that card under win 10.
It's probably the last sound card most gamers bought. After this Realtek got "good enough" and I'm amazed Creative is still in business but they were big in the mp3 market.
I had one of these! Not the Fatal1ty Edition, but the whole X-Fi setup with front and rear panels! I used the front panel to record music and stream midi tracks to my parents’ baby grand “pianomation” player piano!
And hearing the 50-cal sniper rifle for the first time on Battlefield 2 was truly an awesome experience.
Even today there is a huge difference between stand alone sound card and on-board sound. I have an X99 board with a Realtek ALC892 Audio Codec and I regard this sound as very horrible! It's not very clear and there are interferences with the mouse movement. I upgraded my sound to ASUS Xonar Essence STX II 7.1 and - ohh boy - this sound is amazing! It's so clear and detailed - it's so awesome! OK, I use also studio headphones (Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro 250 Ohm Edition) and this combination just blows me away. I always will be using stand alone audio cards! In the past I was also a creative sound card fan! I had SoundBlaster 128, Live! 1024, Live! 5.1, X-Fi Xtreme Music and aftre that X-Fi Fatal1ty edition (the one you have, but without the front panel). I was always a fan of good sound :)
Thanks to that video I started investigating and manage to put EAX support on Doom 3 BFG Edition
Lol did you cheat in the 357?
YEP
Jesus, do you smell Valve content even if it isn't in the video's title?
Oh, that's nothing. He can hear pudding.
Trokoder Hong
Or the husbands :P
Artifact News Network
I bought an X-Fi platinum PCI in 2005, and it's part of the reason I'm still on an LGA1366 6c/12t Xeon X5675 @ 4.6GHz. I do audio creation/production/mastering and latency is key for me, which is why the PCI-E X-Fi is a no go, due to the latency issues Creative has with PCI-E. LGA1366 Xeon's still have the lowest cache-to-cache latency across all cache page modes, which means an LGA1366 Xeon with a PCI X-Fi EMU20 is STILL to this day, the lowest latency audio mastering system around.
Lmao the computer calling out!
Those XF-i's were so good! I had a Platinum back in the day.
One little publicised feature is an onboard Dolby and DTS hardware decoder.
You can plug your console in via optical, it'll decode the 5.1 signal in hardware and output it via 6 channels over analogue.
Such a useful feature as you got the DACs on the card!
I don't know cards these days that do it.
This is very fitting. I'm watching this video on what is my 2006 XP dream computer, fully kitted out wit period correct peripherals, artifacts and things. Very nice.
What are the specs?
Oh it's nothing amazing really, but someting I drooled over at the time, when I was still little. It's a HP xw4400 workstation with a Core2Duo 6600 with 4GB RAM, Radeon X1300 GPU (kinda old and crappy for the time, but eh) fans replaced with Noctuas so it's practically silent, and a Zalman Reserator 2 cooler for the CPU and GPU. Those are not top specs even for the time, but it gives a good experience. Especially with all the right peripherals, speakers, monitors and things. It gives a pretty good illusion of it still being 2006. lol
Electricguy Nice, I actually have a XW9400 with 2x dual core Opterons.
But on my XP PC I have a Core2 Duo E6300 @ 2.33GHz, 2gb RAM and 19" HP LP1965 1280x1024 monitor. I'm probably going to upgrade the CPU to a E6700 and get some GeForce 8800 series card.
Here is a picture of the setup: i.imgur.com/F8B7inR.jpg
My best XP machine has a core 2 quad q6700 and a gtx 750 ti
Like you, I also had a Fatal1ty Championship card way back in the day, with a black 5.25" break out box, and I loved that front panel! I don't know why (or when) I got rid of it. Probably when work sent me a dedicated rig with "good enough" onboard audio, and my own machine kicked the bucket around the same time.
And now I'm on the hunt for classic X-FI cards for my retro rigs I'm slowly piecing together. PCI for my P3 rig, and PCIe for a Core 2 rig.
Wow the computer sounds friendly
It's not like you were using *sarcasm* ....
It's EVIL computing brain [sinister laugh]
I'm still rocking their top model X-Fi Elite Pro. I have been moving that card into my new PC everytime i build a new one. Now its running in my i7, 16GB on Windows 10. Creative was kind enough to release Windows 10 drivers for this baby after all those years. I will cry like a baby when it dies on me. So far its still running great.
Watching this on my phone's mono speaker😂
I have a SoundBlaster Z installed in my current PC. I bought a nice 5.1 surround sound system, and there was just something missing. Didn't feel as surround as I had expected. Ended up getting the Soundblaster Z, and it really improved the sound on my system. The surround sound transformed into what almost sounds like wearing headphones. I use to feel like using a simulated surround sound on headphones was the way to go to get the most accurate directional audio, but now I play with my speakers, and I can hear exactly where everything is coming from. The dedicated sound card made a huge difference!
Your voice is so mellow on my Soundblaster Z connected to my Kratos S5. Thumbs up.
And I am here enjoying this video on my 5 years old smartphone with 10$ in-ear headphones... yeah
@@jayhill2193 I had both too. Its really better, but not that much that I would everybody recommend to. Upgrade. At least with akg k550 headphones. Well virtual surround has improved allot.
I had an Audigy 2 ZS (without the panel) back in the day. It sounded so much better than integrated. I've never NOT had a creative sound card since. Currently rocking my trusty X-FI Titanium Fatal1ty Pro PCI-E card on a new Windows 10 build. Works just as good as it did when I bought it like 10 years ago..
I have a Sound Blaster ZX at this moment, I refuse to let go of creative sound blaster cards ! #soundblaster4eva
I believe I bought one of the standard X-Fi cards when they came out (I was in university at the time) as I had a 5.1 system and I have always gone for a dedicated soundcard where I could in my machines. In fact up until my last couple of PC's, X-Fi's were my go to card (after which I got the Sound Blaster Z series, up to the ZXR I have in my current rig. Call me old fashioned but I just prefer to have a dedicated card for sound where I can :D
XP made me slam down the mouse
I'm not sure if I had a sound card in 2007, but my last card was a Sound Blaster Live! which I still adore to this day. I still want a Sound Blaster card of some kind in my next build. Thanks for this cool and informative video!
Every single one of my PCs, beginning with my 486 DX33, had a Sound Blaster card. I will put a dedicated Sound Blaster card into my PCs as long as Creative is going to make them. I also do not understand the "onboard sound is at least as good" argument. I have a cheap motherboard. The onboard sound sounds like crap, compared to Sound Blaster cards.
Oh man, I had this card and I loved it. I had a custom GM SoundFont that I put together from the best bits of other SoundFonts. The optical ports on the front were hooked up to my HiFi so I could both play audio over my 5.1 and use the DAC in my receiver to record from tapes and vinyl records. I had a MIDI keyboard plugged into the front MIDI port. My case at the time had cables coming out of the back, top and thanks to this thing the front too. Man I had a lot of fun with that rig.
IM SO HYPED!
for the sound card? chill out kid
The X-Fi is the SB I passed on. But got it and better in my old Azuntech Forte card. It was a better X-Fi. Congrats on your new card. bet you do love it. Not dissing the Audigy but that X-Fi is a big upgrade.
Nice card with replacable opamps... I still have a Forte 7. 1 somewhere .Too bad they went bankrupt
1:13, demonic sound
My word, that was a blast from the past.
Proper got flash backs when you did the speaker test "left speaker, right speaker"
I miss XP :(
i have that EXACT card in my pc right now .. owned it since its release and still use it now on my skylake board with windows 10 with an 17 cpu .. i have never had a better card ever .. i even bought the elite xfi external unit with all the dials and full size midi on there but now on windows 10 that elite external unit just sits in the back of the draw not being used as windows damaged the driver support for that in the latest fall update . you can actually get optical 7.1 dts sound out of this card very easy indeed and it supports dolby digital hd the newer blu ray format ..the surround capability on this card is unreal and even today its amazing .. . the card xfi fatality1 championship series still lives on and beats the pants of everything .. best few hundred pound i have ever spent . creative still have some drivers for it altho the last few years its been getting worse on support as it went end of life a long time back ..
I'm probably the only person who'll say so, but the changes in the Doom 3 audio sound worse with the card in my opinion. I see what they're trying to do, but especially for something like dialogue, that reverb is excessive.
Nope, you're not alone. Watching this video on an 80W Japanese hi-fi amp from Luxman and two 40W speaker columns the size of a cupboard and it sucks. The reverb is too much.
From what I've read the addition of EAX to Doom 3 was a bit rushed and not something id wanted to add in the first place. They only did so because it was part of the settlement over the whole "Carmack's Reverse" lawsuit between id and Creative (google it for the details). Creative made an agreement with id out of court that if they licensed creatives EAX from them and implemented it into Doom 3 they would not pursue legal action so that's how EAX ended up in Doom 3. I'm pretty sure before the legal threats Carmack went out of his way to mention that Doom 3 was going to have advanced 3D audio tech built in without the need for special hardware.
Wow what a blast from the past...👍 I had the exact same setup back in the day and this video brought back so many good memories. Thank you for sharing this video with us...💯
Is there any benefit to having a sound card in this day and age? lol
For getting higher-quality audio with low noise, absolutely. Especially for audio editing and content production.
If you're just gaming then integrated stuff is normally fine.
dont modern gpus also come with some sort of audio chip or watever seeing as how its off a hdmi connection and my 1060 always installs audio drivers
Better SNR or Dolby/DTS encoding if it's not supported by the integrated sound. Microsoft gimped sound card capabilities in Windows Vista and newer versions, because Creative drivers were bad and Microsoft was tired of dealing with their issues.
Audio over HDMI is actually a digital stream, so your GPU is really just forwarding the system audio mix to the TV/monitor, which has its own DAC.
Yes canyon.mid?
Maybe I never noticed this on my own setup before....but great job recording that helicopter in stereo...I heard it pan from left to center to right and back again perfectly.
@LGR
You mention almost no "CONS" for this card (also for the previous creative card), it looks almost like an advertising. This video: I don't like.
creative cards are known for having CONS: bad drivers, compatibility issues not solved by creative with many chipsets, not beign really compatible with features as advertised, bloated drivers/software, cheap amplifiers on very expensive soundcards, etc., etc. Since forever, since soundblaster/1/pro/16/awe32/awe64/vibra, sb live, live 5.1, 128, audigy, etc. etc.
Sorry to be the pessimistic side of the tale today :)
There are still benefits to using dedicated sound cards in modern systems. For one the latest soundblaster cards have a much higher dynamic range than the best integrated RealTek HD chips, and there are some combinations of sound effects on multiple channels that come through much clearer, so it's easier to identify individual sounds, which otherwise are a slight mess on the integrated chips. Whether or not you get unwanted noise really depends on the quality of the motherboard - since it's the power regulation and signal filtering in the motherboard that usually determines if audible noise makes it into the audio output. But as always it really depends on what you do and what you play. Many console ports won't be able to fully utilize a dedicated soundcard because they're made for the very limited sound capabilities of the consoles, so they use only a few channels and rarely bother with proper spatial audio
These days for music production Focusrite offers great value plus leaves creative in the dust, as no serious music producer would use a creative card! Having said that back in their day they were pretty good and offered good value! Also I was surprised at how good Doom 3 looks I wished I had got it back in the day. Cheers
1794 in my titanium HD that i still use to this day beats every of that plastic boxes with akm's and cheap pre's.
I had one of these very "Fata1ty" X-fi sound cards in my 2007 build. Funny thing is, I just found it while going through a bunch of old boxes. I missed using it so much I went out the next day and bought myself a new dedicated sound card for my current PC build to use instead of the onboard "good enough" sound. If you are still using on board sound, it is definitely worth buying a dedicated sound card.
Also, watching you explaining the Creative labs sound controls, including the X-fi crystallizer, brought back some good memories :).
I enjoy these "retro build" videos or whatever you want to refer to them as. I get to have a look at hardware that I was always curious about at the time but wasn't in a position to buy and basically just skipped over as a result. I never got to scratch that itch to tinker with the stuff though, so these videos are great.
I still have that exact same card in my actual system today, running on windows 8.1 xD is the only piece of hardware that has come a long way, basically in all my systems since 2007, great video, thanks!!
Thanks for bringing me back to the days working for Creative Tech. It is people like you that make my effort worth it.
Turns out, even in 2018 buying a sound card will give you a lot of benefits over using an onboard video card or your GPU to do the job. "Good enough" alright. I just bought a SoundBlaster from 2012 and holy fuck I can't believe me took this long to do so. Not only the sound quality is immensely better but it also free up resources on your CPU and GPU make games to perform better since all your audio processing is now being handled by a dedicated hardware. It totally worth getting a sound card now. They are still going strong.
Unless you're using a Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium PCI-e with Windows 10 drivers on old EAX-supported games, you will gain precisely zero performance increase. Creative cards after the X-Fi line just use software-emulated Alchemy, the exact same kind you can download for free called "Creative ALchemy Universal". All modern games use software APIs like FMOD, Wwise, or XAudio2 that are mixed entirely on CPU.
Holy shit! I had the Xtreme Audio PCIe version of that card in my first PC build in 2006. I think I still have it loose in a box around here somewhere. I never thought I would see that on LGR.
I got goosebumps during the half life 2 gameplay. I absolutely love the sound in that game!
It's cool to see the XFi range again!!! I made the same call in late 2006, after buying BF2142 on launch day. Even though my SB Live! card could do good sound, upgrading to an XFi card made all the difference in 2006. Though that version of me would have been jealous of you as I never had the Fatal1ty card though, I had a cheaper XtremeGamer OEM card I picked up from a budget hardware store. Good to see BF2 again too!!! Clocked over 1000 hours in that game LOL
this is classic already? damn im getting older. Battlefield 2 is still on my list of games i want to play just never have time