Which sound card out of these:

[Bungral]

Howdy all,

Just been having a little search around and PC World have got some soundcards seriously cheap.

I was wondering which of the following you reckon is best?

Obviously it depends on your set up which mine isn't great, but I plan on getting a proper set of speakers soon. Basically which is future proof and a good deal.

Link

I believe out of the list the X-Fi Elite Pro and X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatality Pro have had the largest sum knocked off the price.

While the Elite Pro is well cheap compared to elsewhere, the reviews I've read say it's box is massively laggy (like change volume and it'll actually do it 10 seconds later).

The XtremeGamer isn't as much of a saving but for £50 ya reckon it's the better buy?

Edit:

Also think PC World near me might have one of these in on special: Link

How does that fit in. Only reason I can't gauge is the pricing.

 

[Hatman]

Dunno what the super expensive ones could offer but I use the xifi gamer xtreme and its pretty darn nice quality

 

[Ging3r]

Alot of it depends on whats coming out of it, so what sort of speakers/headset.

If they are really high quality speakers/headset, then i would go for the more expensive as you will find more of a difference. Where as if your setup is on the cheaper side, then the difference betweenthe expensive and cheap sound cards will be alot less

 

[Ham]

Save the cash for decent speakers/amp and use on-board optical out if your board has it. There's not really such thing as quality for a digital signal, it either gets there or it dosn't.

 

[Bungral]

Save the cash for decent speakers/amp and use on-board optical out if your board has it. There's not really such thing as quality for a digital signal, it either gets there or it dosn't.

But I aint using digital yet... Also have nothing to plug a digital signal into at the minute.

Just for the second I'm looking to get my sound outputted to my TV which was fine until I swapped my GFX card from an X2 to a 280. I just can't think of another way around it at the moment. Any ideas would be much appreciated.

When I changed the drivers to the Nvidia ones it just stopped the way I had it working. I've wanted to get a new sound card anyway and this gives me a good reason as they are pretty cheap compared to elsewhere and if it solves my issue that I've just spend about 3 hours trying to find a way around and failed then I'd be happy!

 

[Bungral]

Ok I've sorted my issue but now I might just buy a decent sound card for the sake of it as my audio isn't digital it should improve the quality.

 

[Rastalovich]

I'd love to say, hand on heart, that those sound cards will be better than ur mobo supplied one... however I'm very skeptical of soundcards since vista.

 

[Hatman]

My one worked no less on vista then it does now on XP the drivers were rpetty impressive considering when I first got my soundcard I had vista and there were none.

 

[Bungral]

Gone with the Fatal1ty XtremeGamer as it was like £45 on sale in store and next cheapest place is over £85.

Could have got the Elite Pro for £72 which was beyond tempting seeing as that's a good £100 cheaper than anywhere else online. Only thing that stopped me was that the breakout box is meant to have crappy latency. Spose I could have sold that and just kept the card.

 

[Kojak71]

To add to Rastalovich's to comments, it's going to be pretty hard to distinguish between onboard audio and discrete, that's if you are using it for audio/visual purposes such as HTPC. On my HTPC which has onboard Dolby THX certified audio, I just passthrough the sound through either optical/coaxial to my AV amp. ATi have even put audio on their graphics cards, for audio passthrough when using HDMI (which I'll be taking advantage of when I get round to getting an AV amp with HDMI inputs).

However X-Fi does have some extra features for gamers like EAX5.0. But there's a problem, X-Fi predates the release of Vista, and the mainstream adoption of PCIe. Vista doesn't allow EAX to work (although you can get mixed results by using Creative's Alchemy emulation program), and although they repackaged the card to support PCIe it was beset with audio issues (although a lot of these have been supposedly ironed out). Creative tend to take their time between releases of new products, last few generations have a gap of 4 years, and the X-Fi was released in August 2005, so I wouldn't be surprised if we see a new card from them at about the time Windows 7 is released.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster#First_Sound_Blasters:_the_right_bundle

 

[Rastalovich]

htbh, I've had no success whatsoever with Alchemy.

Keep an eye on the old-post bumpage m8.