New Sound Card

I have recently preordered a new PCI soundcard: Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty™ FPS. Many think the new Creative soundcards are overprized but in my opinion it is worth it. My preorder price is 205€ here in Germany but the X-Fi series appears like a much anticipated innovation. Sure thing that most game developers will adopt the new tech.

For the people among you, that wonder why there is no PCI Express version of the card: Steve Erickson, vice president for Creative's audio products was kind enough to answer this particular question at http://www.guru3d.com/:

As far as PCI Express (PCIe) is concerned, which is the next bus, what we found is that the performance of PCIe is truly bad for audio. We are seeing four times degradation on the bus for audio.

PCIe is designed for graphics and high data transfer, but audio sends very small packets and the overhead can be very big! Moving the data across PCIe is much, much higher than PCI. So what we have to do is go back to the drawing board and work on the transport part of the chip and re-design it to add more silicon to overcome some of the problems we had with PCIe. So for us to come up with a PCIe solution is going to take a while because we have to overcome the problems we're facing with that bus.

X-Fi cards will appear as 4 models. The Fatal1ty appears the most worthy to me. It features stunning 109dB SNR audio quality, accelerates gaming performance and includes 64MB of on-board X-RAM for high performance gaming. With support for EAX® ADVANCED HD™ 5.0, the latest version of the EAX Environmental Audio standard, the Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS card utilizes X-Fi CMSS 3D technology for stunning audio realism over headphones in LAN gaming. The Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS features a convenient front-facing internal drive bay for easy connectivity, plus the X-Fi IR remote to easily access and control all digital entertainment, and to control the X-Fi 24-bit Crystalizer, X-Fi CMSS 3D, 3DMIDI and EAX. In addition to providing outstanding gaming performance, the Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS includes all of the standard features, application software, power and performance capabilities of the Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum and Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music.

Unfortunately all german online shops don't have them in stock yet. It will take 2-6 weeks until they appear in retail here. Click the headline for more info on the new cards at the SoundBlaster website.

Maybe I can upgrade my PC further at X-mas time. ;-)