XP Upgrade! Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Sound Card
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
wvjeepguy81
I installed my first Creative soundcard back in 2000. It was absolutely amazing, and came with 3 full games that took advantage of it. Thief, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, and one other game that I can't remember. Along with the sound card, I also got a set of 4 surround sound speakers and a subwoofer that I believe were also made by Creative.
Several years later, I built a pc and splurged on a high end Asus ROG motherboard because one of the main features was the onboard audio supposedly being high end. It turned out to be horrible and couldn't push the true 7. 1 surround sound headphones that I had purchased at the same time. I stopped at Best Buy and picked up a new Soundblaster, and it was still leaps ahead and had no issues powering the headphones.
Unfortunately for Creative, their driver and software support went to absolute hell. The drivers would constantly crash and software that worked fine the day before was completely unresponsive the next day for no apparent reason. It was an absolutely infuriating mess trying to deal with, so I have since given up on them and just use USB virtual surround sound headphones these days.
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I installed my first Creative soundcard back in 2000. It was absolutely amazing, and came with 3 full games that took advantage of it. Thief, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, and one other game that I can't remember. Along with the sound card, I also got a set of 4 surround sound speakers and a subwoofer that I believe were also made by Creative.
Several years later, I built a pc and splurged on a high end Asus ROG motherboard because one of the main features was the onboard audio supposedly being high end. It turned out to be horrible and couldn't push the true 7. 1 surround sound headphones that I had purchased at the same time. I stopped at Best Buy and picked up a new Soundblaster, and it was still leaps ahead and had no issues powering the headphones.
Unfortunately for Creative, their driver and software support went to absolute hell. The drivers would constantly crash and software that worked fine the day before was completely unresponsive the next day for no apparent reason. It was an absolutely infuriating mess trying to deal with, so I have since given up on them and just use USB virtual surround sound headphones these days.
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Sean
One of my favorite uses of EAX is Condemned Criminal Origins. It makes a noticeable difference and in a great way. Not just reverb, but genuinely useful and cool things like fantastic sound occlusion (for example a gunshot sounds much different if there are walls or a door between the source of the shot. Really good 3D audio making it much easier to tell where a sound is coming from in 3D space and how far away it is with just headphones or even my old but still fantastic Logitech z 2300. I'm not surprised EAX died though, creative drivers were well known to be a source of instability back in the day. Prompting Microsoft to make the changes in Vista that killed hardware accelerated audio. But Creative did a awful job trying to develop and promote their own API for it called OpenAL. And now it seems the future of hardware accelerated audio is going to be accelerated by the GPU using ray traced audio. This is one reason even as a PC gamer I'm actually quite excited to see Sony putting so much focus into game audio with the PS5. Game audio has not gotten much attention in a long time.
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One of my favorite uses of EAX is Condemned Criminal Origins. It makes a noticeable difference and in a great way. Not just reverb, but genuinely useful and cool things like fantastic sound occlusion (for example a gunshot sounds much different if there are walls or a door between the source of the shot. Really good 3D audio making it much easier to tell where a sound is coming from in 3D space and how far away it is with just headphones or even my old but still fantastic Logitech z 2300. I'm not surprised EAX died though, creative drivers were well known to be a source of instability back in the day. Prompting Microsoft to make the changes in Vista that killed hardware accelerated audio. But Creative did a awful job trying to develop and promote their own API for it called OpenAL. And now it seems the future of hardware accelerated audio is going to be accelerated by the GPU using ray traced audio. This is one reason even as a PC gamer I'm actually quite excited to see Sony putting so much focus into game audio with the PS5. Game audio has not gotten much attention in a long time.
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Gabe
Is it worth putting my old sound blaster fatality 64mb soundcard, it's the gaming Jonathan Wendell one, in my rig that's 2 years old with a Gigabyte X99-SLI Intel X99 (Socket 2011) DDR4 ATX Motherboard in it? My sound card has 3 diff platforms, one for movie watching, one for gaming that flies a helo around your head and u know even with headphones where it is at what 'o'clock' and also a sound engineering platform which my son would use maybe as a DJ but he got all that now and signed. My problem is when I play games after a while of thumping out auto rounds the sound goes off or intermittent, reckon the old sound blaster would fix it? Only reason I never put it in was cos it has a front panel which my new rig has a disc player there! Anyway is it worth it or does my mobo have better kit than my old sound card? I only use headphones really.
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Is it worth putting my old sound blaster fatality 64mb soundcard, it's the gaming Jonathan Wendell one, in my rig that's 2 years old with a Gigabyte X99-SLI Intel X99 (Socket 2011) DDR4 ATX Motherboard in it? My sound card has 3 diff platforms, one for movie watching, one for gaming that flies a helo around your head and u know even with headphones where it is at what 'o'clock' and also a sound engineering platform which my son would use maybe as a DJ but he got all that now and signed. My problem is when I play games after a while of thumping out auto rounds the sound goes off or intermittent, reckon the old sound blaster would fix it? Only reason I never put it in was cos it has a front panel which my new rig has a disc player there! Anyway is it worth it or does my mobo have better kit than my old sound card? I only use headphones really.
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Albert
I still keep the original box with all its Creative Music accessories, with front audio rack. I never had the specific creative model for gaming (which is this one from the video) But the audio was a before and after when I activated EAX 5. 0 in games like the first Tomb Raider, Doom3, Comandos beyond, etc. I acquired shortly after, Inspire 7. 1 creative THX speakers. and Star Wars movies were taken to another level. I never had for almost a decade another sound card, this was a wonderful DTS, EAX, Dolby digital EX, THX. Then I had Asus models, but the drivers were never on par with the damn windows apis.
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I still keep the original box with all its Creative Music accessories, with front audio rack. I never had the specific creative model for gaming (which is this one from the video) But the audio was a before and after when I activated EAX 5. 0 in games like the first Tomb Raider, Doom3, Comandos beyond, etc. I acquired shortly after, Inspire 7. 1 creative THX speakers. and Star Wars movies were taken to another level. I never had for almost a decade another sound card, this was a wonderful DTS, EAX, Dolby digital EX, THX. Then I had Asus models, but the drivers were never on par with the damn windows apis.
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MadMac5
I had a X-Fi XtremeMusic back in the day, but really was annoyed by how I could only use EAX with the card in Game Mode. This forced the audio to be resampled to 48 kHz, which resulted in some distortion that really bothered me. I kept it in Audio Creation Mode most of the time as a result, which made it sound pretty darned amazing on good speakers.
Oh, and don't forget how when Vista changed the audio stack, EAX only worked when using the Creative Alchemy, which performed all of the sound processing in software and left the X-Fi as a really expensive dongle. :\
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I had a X-Fi XtremeMusic back in the day, but really was annoyed by how I could only use EAX with the card in Game Mode. This forced the audio to be resampled to 48 kHz, which resulted in some distortion that really bothered me. I kept it in Audio Creation Mode most of the time as a result, which made it sound pretty darned amazing on good speakers.
Oh, and don't forget how when Vista changed the audio stack, EAX only worked when using the Creative Alchemy, which performed all of the sound processing in software and left the X-Fi as a really expensive dongle. :\
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Willaim
I don't know about 2007, but My first XP machine had a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value. I loved the differance in my Compaq Presario SR1303 with a Sempron 3000+. Man have we came a long way since then. I had it hooked to a 5. 1 Decoder receiver via SPDIF. It was awesome for the time. I still enjoy sound cards to this day. I just discovered general MIDI works on my Asus Xonar DX 7. 1 and Creative sound cards. The music in Duke Nukem 3d won't play with the GPUs sound output burt works on my Creative sound card in DOSBOX. Awesome stuff.
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I don't know about 2007, but My first XP machine had a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value. I loved the differance in my Compaq Presario SR1303 with a Sempron 3000+. Man have we came a long way since then. I had it hooked to a 5. 1 Decoder receiver via SPDIF. It was awesome for the time. I still enjoy sound cards to this day. I just discovered general MIDI works on my Asus Xonar DX 7. 1 and Creative sound cards. The music in Duke Nukem 3d won't play with the GPUs sound output burt works on my Creative sound card in DOSBOX. Awesome stuff.
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honorablejay
I still have my old X-fi Gamer card, but I can't use it since it's PCI only. One of the issues I had with that card was getting proper 5. 1 surround sound out of it. For my card, Creative used 2 jacks instead of 3 for surround, which was tailored towards their own speakers. So I did what anyone would do: I made an adapter for my Tritton 5. 1 analog headset. It consisted of two 4-pole 3. 5mm to a/v out (designed for camdorders) and plugged into three female RCA stereo to female stereo 3. 5mm jacks. Worked like a charm.
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I still have my old X-fi Gamer card, but I can't use it since it's PCI only. One of the issues I had with that card was getting proper 5. 1 surround sound out of it. For my card, Creative used 2 jacks instead of 3 for surround, which was tailored towards their own speakers. So I did what anyone would do: I made an adapter for my Tritton 5. 1 analog headset. It consisted of two 4-pole 3. 5mm to a/v out (designed for camdorders) and plugged into three female RCA stereo to female stereo 3. 5mm jacks. Worked like a charm.
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ohio
Glad I watched this after the original build. I was confused why he used the 32 bit install vs the 64 bit. I didn't think about how it messes up the older programs especially games.
Oddly enough some people still use 32 bit windows 7 and 10. The first thing I did when I got this IT job was to rid the company of 32 bit installs which the previous IT person did and often in systems which had 8gb of ram. What's the point of that -.
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Glad I watched this after the original build. I was confused why he used the 32 bit install vs the 64 bit. I didn't think about how it messes up the older programs especially games.
Oddly enough some people still use 32 bit windows 7 and 10. The first thing I did when I got this IT job was to rid the company of 32 bit installs which the previous IT person did and often in systems which had 8gb of ram. What's the point of that -.
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D4rkstorn
That CMSS-3D thing is actually rather impressive on standard stereo headphones(AKG K271, even when just watching this video. Closed my eyes and it was spot on. Literally 100% convincing.
So i don't think it was made for speakers, but rather headphones. I had the X-Fi too ages ago but i didn't notice any benefit with that on my speakers compared to game-specific software 3D-audio -emulation. -
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That CMSS-3D thing is actually rather impressive on standard stereo headphones(AKG K271, even when just watching this video. Closed my eyes and it was spot on. Literally 100% convincing.
So i don't think it was made for speakers, but rather headphones. I had the X-Fi too ages ago but i didn't notice any benefit with that on my speakers compared to game-specific software 3D-audio -emulation. -
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AtheoAng3l0
Watching this reminds me of when tech wiz kid me used to annoy my parents about getting our own SB card. Haha. In my late teens, tho, I finally got one: the SB X-Fi HD, a plug-and-play USB card. I thought I was content with Realtek, but like when I got my very first video card, I prefer not going back. I'm still using it with my ROG Strix Scar and even the PCs I borrow. Haha.
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Watching this reminds me of when tech wiz kid me used to annoy my parents about getting our own SB card. Haha. In my late teens, tho, I finally got one: the SB X-Fi HD, a plug-and-play USB card. I thought I was content with Realtek, but like when I got my very first video card, I prefer not going back. I'm still using it with my ROG Strix Scar and even the PCs I borrow. Haha.
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