PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series

I just picked one of these up because I grew tired of waiting over a year and a half for the maker of my integrated audio chip, to supply a functioning driver. The SigmaTel / IDT chip on my Intel board was decent enough for playback but the drivers were so bad and lacked things like input monitoring, proper switching of recording inputs while in games for voice coms, etc. The drivers would crash and I would lose my mic. They were just horrible. BTW Sigmatel / IDT finally as of a month or so ago added input monitoring to their driver and it still doesnt work. Sigmatel/IDT's new driver also has a huge memory leak where the driver process will use up to 35% CPU. You have to kill the process then restart it to fix it everytime it happens. ENOUGH with Sigmtel /IDT. I cant stand them and That is why i bought a Creative Sound Blaster X-FI Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series card. (Yes the name is stupidly long)

I was worried because its branded with "Fatal1ty" gamer nonsense and I...Read more

I expected an improvement over my old Creative card. This one is head and shoulders beyond it. If you don't put the settings too crazy, and keep it more "level" it sounds very good on my relatively poor Altec Lansing headphones. Much more volume, so the headroom is reasonable; it still needs a good headphone amp if you want the best, though... but, it sounds believable.

It was expensive, yes, but so far from what I have heard in two weeks of listening, I will be able to have very good sound through a lot of motherboard upgrades with this card. The RCA inputs are an important, added feature for me, as is the volume control. I am glad I "bit the bullet".

I was blown away by the sound quality of this unit.It's a huge
improvement over the onboard realtek chip.Clarity and directional
positioning in games is amazing and music is vastly improved.
The cmss-3d with headphones does a great job with 5.1 simulation.
Also to note,installation on Vista was a breeze.I installed from
the disc and let auto update do the rest.The software is a bit
bloated but the bells and whistles are fun.You can also do a custom
install and select what you want.If you game or enjoy music you can't
go wrong.I highly recommend this card.