Soundblaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS
april 17th, 2007. Published under Hardware, Software. No Comments.
I got my self one :)
No particular reason to why though, since i already had a nice and fully working Sound blaster Audigy 2 ZS. I think the main reason was the fact that the X-Fi had the 64 MB RAM on it, which among other things, allows it to free the CPU of some processing, plus i heard “rumors” about how inferior it was compared to the Audigy 2.
So, is it actually worth the money?
Well, if you asked me the day i got it, or even sometime the same evening, i would have said no, simply because of the hassle i had installing it. Its simply because the way Microsoft and creative choose things to be.
See, in the old days you had to manually assign a IRQ to a piece of hardware in your ISA/PCI ports but windows has taken over for this ow, which is a good thing, but Creative does not share Microsoft’s idea on how they can share IRQs.
Anyways what happened was that Windows Vista, which i use, wouldn’t “let go” of the Soundblaster Audigy 2 drivers, and when i finally manged to get it to forget them something was corrupted in the core somehow in vista so that it wouldn’t allow me to install the X-Fi drivers OR install the Audigy drivers!
This resulted in me having to reinstall Windows Vista. After which it worked like nothing ever happened. I installed the driver i got from creative.com and i got the full effect of the sound. I was like .. OMG is this possible ? i actually made a difference, i heard details in game i did not hear before ( Company Of Heroes in this case ) well, just everything was awesome. So now I’m thrilled about it :)
