The Creative X-Fi is
certainly a big leap forward for Creative in terms of
hardware, finally ditching a lot of the issues found in the
previous generations of their soundcards.
No more poor resampling,
significantly increased processing power and a big push
towards improving game performance via OpenAL and X-RAM
(Fatal1ty FPS and the Elite Pro only). It all comes at a
price of course and the Fatal1ty FPS is certainly not cheap
at
$260, which means for most the Xtreme Music version will
be far more compelling at well under half the price ($115 -
it lacks the Remote and Drive Bay along with X-RAM).
Considering the few
games that support X-RAM currently I would be hard pushed to
recommend the Fatal1ty FPS over any of the other versions.
Even if the extra in/outputs were a real consideration, the
Platinum also offers these and is notably cheaper, too.
The decision of whether
you should upgrade or invest in a soundcard like the X-Fi
boils down to the importance you give to audio in your PC,
and what kind of speakers you plan to use for that purpose.
Owners of previous Creative soundcards will audibly benefit
from all the hardware improvements, and expansion of
existing features (e.g. more ASIO sampling rates), while
those with other high quality soundcards (Revolution 7.1,
and the like) would benefit greatly from excellent hardware
accelerated features/superior gaming support with no real
compromise in audio quality.
