$400 sound card?! Whaahuh?!

[Knightshade Dragon]

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000340053618/
Original PR: http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/08-08-2005/0004084421&EDATE=

Creative is announcing a 400 dollar sound card.  I'm just curious if this one, much like every other sound card they've made in the last 10 years, will cause rampant run-away CPU usage, pops and hissing in games, lockups, and other various shades of hell within your case.

[dangerballs]

The X-Fi shouldn't cause any CPU usage as all sound processing is done on the card and the high-end cards have 64MB of ram on them.  Driver issues are a whole other matter though   .  

$400 is pretty expensive for a gaming card, but super cheap for a professional sound card.  If the Elite Pro can actually have ASIO latency under 1ms and has the onboard features of their EMU line, then it would be a pretty good bargain.

[Calvin]

That's absurd. Really. Unfortunately for me, a few months ago every sound card I tried to put in my system, Creative or not, caused the type of problems Ron mentioned above. Now I creak by with on-board sound for the love of all thats holy. What a disgrace.

[Crawley]

It comes in the $130 flavor as well but it doesn't have the 64MB on board memory (http://gear.ign.com/articles/640/640030p1.html). I am curious about these cards though as there was some positive buzz on X-fi experience at E3.

It looks like you can get the top of the line "fatal1ty" card for $200 right now with Creatives promo. Its endorsed by a gamer so will improve your gaming skills, guarenteed. http://us.creative.com/local/1/promo/fatal1ty/welcome.asp

Now if you excuse me I need to put on my Jordans and show my buds how the game is played! D-Up fellas!

[Dreamshadow]

I'll have some more information on this on Friday.  There will be a press event at QuakeCon for this.  Hopefully it will let me weed a little more through the PR speak to see what is really in there.  Of course, it'll take a direct comparison to other hardware to make a real call on it.

[stiffler]

My favorite quote: "High Quality? Yes top-end hi-fi lovers really go for 3.5 mm jack plugs to link their equipemnt."

The only reason I used to buy Sound Blaster cards was the nifty extras like the drive bay boxes, and before that assured compatibility.  Now these are pretty moot with the many third-party devices and DirectX.  I always found EAX to be a big joke, not to mention the list of buggy games in which it was the culprit.

Maybe I'm just lame, but I've been pretty happy with my onboard sound (Nvidia SoundStorm).  Of course I've got the phat $25 2.1 system and the crap sounding (but otherwise cool) Dell soundbar.

[Sterling]

That's absurd. Really. Unfortunately for me, a few months ago every sound card I tried to put in my system, Creative or not, caused the type of problems Ron mentioned above. Now I creak by with on-board sound for the love of all thats holy. What a disgrace.

Me too!

Of course.  My onbound sound supports EAX 2, 7.1 3D surround sound, Dolby Digital, and uses maybe 2% CPU.

[Calvin]

That's absurd. Really. Unfortunately for me, a few months ago every sound card I tried to put in my system, Creative or not, caused the type of problems Ron mentioned above. Now I creak by with on-board sound for the love of all thats holy. What a disgrace.

Me too!

Of course.  My onbound sound supports EAX 2, 7.1 3D surround sound, Dolby Digital, and uses maybe 2% CPU.

Well my onboard sound worked great for a few months, even though the quality was only so-so. Unfortunately yesterday some of my old problems, especially in Chaos Theory, seemed to come back. I am quite annoyed.

[Laner]

My favorite quote: "High Quality? Yes top-end hi-fi lovers really go for 3.5 mm jack plugs to link their equipemnt."

I know next to nothing about this new product, but the Audigy 2 ZS had an optional  breakout box that had RCA jacks, optical and coax digital in/iout, 1/4" jacks, etc.  as well as the 3.5mm jacks.

[Jumangi]

Uhh not sure what your talking about the SB line of cards like the Audigy have consistantly been the lowest in CPU usage over the years. The one little fact people ignore when they complain about SB cards and problems is that since their are far more of them out there(at elast in the stand alone market not onboard sound) than any other one they are going to have more complaints.

[stiffler]

Honestly I just hate Creative's drivers (though I understand they at least allow you to download JUST the driver, not the entire suite of bloatware).  More importantly, they completely abandon the old products when a new generation comes out.

I would imagine they are far and away the top gamer card, but are certainly not for serious audio work.  With a breakout box like mentioned above they can be great for novices looking to give it a try.

I'm bummed nVidia gave up on the SoundStorm.  Good competition and a quality onboard solution.

But if money were no object I'd probably get the Creative card.  It does a good job of making noise, it's just a premium part that many don't require.

[olaf]

Yeah I cant stand Creative's drivers either, what an unholy pain in the ass.  Its like most printer drivers, borderline spyware.

I think $400 is a ridiculous price point for a sound card...and the 'gamer' version looks like they are wanting just under $300 for which I think is still too high.

olaf