Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro review

Creative has been a leader in the PC audio market for as long as I can remember. In fact, the first Sound Blaster card hit the market almost 20 years ago, which can be considered an eternity in "computer years".

During this time, Creative has launched about a dozen major soundcards, with their latest outgoing product being the Sound Blaster X-Fi series, which replaced the popular Audigy line a few years ago.

The X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro that we are testing today is Creative's latest offering in the series aimed at audio enthusiasts and especially gamers, making use of a slightly modified chip called EMU20K2 that adds native PCI Express support among a number of improvements and fixes over the previous generation of cards.

http://www.techspot.com/review/115-creative-xfi-titanium-fatal1ty/

Please leave your feedback here. Thanks!

Is there internal support for my case mic and audio jacks?

What is the total bloat, and total size of the software package installed? How much footprint in RAM did it take?

Gah! Still no Linux support? BSOD on the Windows install? Creative?! I'm.... honestly... not much surprised. What have they done with the name we used to love? When will the madness stop and the quality come back?

I know onboard audio is not worthy, but my old Windows XP computer has my last SoundBlaster (X-fi Elite) card that I'll be buying. In that computer, the AC'97 audio was horrendous and needed augmentation. When I built this PC last November, Creative didn't even have a working driver for Vista 64-bit, let alone a beta driver for Linux. Honestly, my new motherboard with ALC889A embedded works fine for my needs, it has Vista 64-bit and Linux support, and I won't be looking back. Thanks for the article - I read all of it. It's an eye opener.

Review update - as reflected in our closing comments:
Right after publishing this review, Creative informed us they have added a new card to the X-Fi line-up. The PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium (http://us.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=1&subcategory=208&product=17927) is selling for a discounted price of $99.99, with the main difference being that it removed the Fatal1ty branded cover. Not a bad deal if you were looking into buying a new Creative soundcard.

The less expensive version is also missing the 64mb x-ram. Although I have no idea if that really makes any difference.