PCI X-Fi Music vs PCIe X-Fi Titanium

Slipperyduck

Slipperyduck

New member
So, I'm taking the plunge, which is probably unnessessesseesesessary I know.

I currently have the PCI X-Fi XtremeMusic. It's the Standard PCI Creative Labs Full X-Fi, but without the X-Ram rubbish. It's been a good n Faithful card for years for me.

Now, I've never really been happy to stick around with PCI and never really been pressed to upgrade to the fancy PCIe X-Fi's - well until now, when I thought - JUST DO IT!

Now, in my mind the PCIe lane will be dedicated, so this should improve audio stability in the system. Not that i really had an issue at any stage anyway....bit I digress;
The reason for my post – has anyone else done this upgrade before? Did it make an iota of a difference in your life?
 
Slipperyduck said:
So, I'm taking the plunge, which is probably unnessessesseesesessary I know.

I currently have the PCI X-Fi XtremeMusic. It's the Standard PCI Creative Labs Full X-Fi, but without the X-Ram rubbish. It's been a good n Faithful card for years for me.

Now, I've never really been happy to stick around with PCI and never really been pressed to upgrade to the fancy PCIe X-Fi's - well until now, when I thought - JUST DO IT!

Now, in my mind the PCIe lane will be dedicated, so this should improve audio stability in the system. Not that i really had an issue at any stage anyway....bit I digress;
The reason for my post – has anyone else done this upgrade before? Did it make an iota of a difference in your life?
Click to expand...

Never really done an upgrade like that yet. I've been happy to stick with my onboard soundcard which in my case (ASUS Rampage II Extrmeme) isn't too bad. I've been eyeing the Asus Xonar D2X.
 
Hi Slipperyduck

I suggest you post your hardware specs. One of the first thoughts that came to mind is what motherboard you have. The PCIe controller chipset could play a big role in the efficiency of your system. For example, some of the low-end range of Intel i5 CPUs have the PCIe controller on-die, and they don't have that many PCIe BUS lanes available. This starts to become a problem when you have a powerful GPU hogging the PCIe BUS, and then start to add other peripherals onto the PCIe BUS.

You will also need a snappy CPU to augment your X-Fi, even though it comes with a hardware audio decoding chip (I'm making an assumption here because I haven't brought myself up to date on the specific X-Fi you are interested in).

If you post your specs, I'm sure that I, or another helpful MyGaming forumite, can offer some advice :)
 
Im not really saying there are any bottlenecks or problems. Just wondering if anyone else has done this MAD upgrade/sidegrade that I'm doing.

anyway;

I've got the following Specs:

Case CoolerMaster HAF 932
Asus P5QD Turbo (Intel P45 Chipset)
Intel Q9450 - Intel Quad 2.6Ghz 12Mb cache (OC'd to meager 3.2Ghz)
+Themalright Ultra 120
4 Gb OCZ DDR2 PC2-8500 Platinum (2 X 2Gb Sticks) (running them at 2.1V)
Zotac GTX280 AMP! (Factory Overclocked GTX280)
CreativeLabs X-Fi XtremeMusic PCI card *(Upgrading to the X-Fi Titanium Fatality this week. ie. what this topic is about)
Boot: Intel X25M Gen2
RAID0 Vol1: 2x500Gb (Seagate drives)
RAID0 Vol2: 2x1Tb (Seagate drives)

Very stable machine.
 
Just a short answer from my side: there's going to be absolutely NO performance increase with this. I'm talking out of experience. Going from onboard sound to dedicated sound MIGHT have a very tiny increase, but all you're doing is changing the bus type on dedicated sound. Seriously, NO benefit except for motherboard layout issues maybe?
 
Nah, I just think it will be more effiecient and futureproof. (since PCI slots seem to be on their way out finally)
Is the Titanium vs the XtremeMusic a better card - I guess is the bottom line.
 
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