Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium sound cards launch

World's first native PCI Express hardware accelerated sound cards

NEWS: 16 May 2008 12:20 GMT by Stuart Miles

Creative has announced that it is offering a new range of internal Sound Blaster cards that promise even better performance than the company's current range.

The new cards will use the PCI Express card slot and go under the moniker of the Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium range and according to Creative have been developed to "meet the specific requests that we've received from end users", i.e., hardcore gamers. The company also says "You'll know why it's worth the upgrade to PCI Express the second you hear it".

The new PCI Express Creative sound cards will be available in two models, the PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional Series and the PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion.

The Professional series will feature Dolby Digital Live encoding, offer single-cable connection to home theatre systems and a stack of other technologies from Creative such as 3D positional audio.

The Champion series sound card includes all the same features as the Professional range, however adds an internal I/O drive for quick front panel connection to headphones and headsets to save gamers fiddling around under their desk.

Creative has yet to announce prices in the UK.

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Have Your Say

Errm...did Creative not consider latest High-end motherboard configurations. The PCI-E slot is all very well; but take for example XFX GX2 Graphics Cards, which will most certainly hinder the small PCI-E x1 port. The Asus 3-way SLi and XFX 3-way SLi boards have PCI-E x1 ports in between 2 PCI-E x16 ports.

Nonetheless, let's say you didn't want the latest graphics cards (huh ?) and went for the 9600GT XXX 'slim' graphics cards instead. The soundcard will restrict airflow to the fan on the graphics cards connected to PCI-E x16 Slot 1.

So you'll need to some-how have ultra-cool airflow directed in-between the graphics card and the sound card.

If this X-Fi Titanium was designed for Hardcore gamers, they should have taken Gamer concernes into account; and decided whether the card was feasible for the latest SLi boards.
kal, UK