Originally posted by: zoiks
I'd buy it if it wasn't based on a Creative chipset.
Then you want any of their other cards. In bench marks their other Cmedia chipped cards do a great job or better the creative other then in the cpu usage and game EAX area. CPU usage it may use 3-5% vs 2%, but because of the way the card is made and all the goodies on it, and designed, it has a much better, and cleaner output, then creative on the movie/music reproduction side, and in crosstalk side nothing can touch it at all.
Why I am kinda excited to see this card come out, if it is as good as the others in the movie/music end of the spectrum as the other cards, dd live, and the other stuff they have have now, and bolt on the crappy creative chip to boast its gaming performance and give it kick ass gaming capabilities as well with the rest, it will be a card I will want to buy, and may pay $300 for it if it kills anything out there in every aspect known to man giving me top of the line professional results no other card can touch.
Right now it is hailed as as the best music/movie card out there and DIY's dream for you can upgrade the small little amp chips to something even better making one hell of a card even better supposedly. Couple that with eax5 hd gaming, I got a boner! I just hope this lives up to its hype, know in a few weeks when it comes out and people get their hands on it, never really been excited over any other hardware, but this would be great to have great sound for everything and the possibilities of stable drivers if they are done by someone other then creative, which I heard the drivers are being done by their in house guys so I am looking so forward to this.
On the bad side it may be a mix of their drivers and creative's, creative takes over for when your gaming, then their's for everything else. I'm good with that since on the gaming side it wouldn't be no different then buying a actual creative card, but on the other side the drivers that take over would smoke anything creative has ever done and it would be like having 2 cards for the price of one taking up one slot. If they incorporated all the other stuff from all their other cards to this one, no way in hell creative would have any drivers for that stuff, I really think it would just be for the game drivers end of things only. I will say this though about creative cards, when they work good with a game I have never owned another card that could match its sound reproduction in gaming immersion. They really have that end nailed down that no other cards on the market can come close to reproducing in game sound. I just wish their cards worked with every damn game, didn't make my computer act funky, crash it, reboot it, make it start up on its own, thats where the other card companies got creative is because all the rest make cards that work with every game, don't crash your computer, and are very stable. If creative could do that, well then they would have the market hands down and no one would be looking for another sound card to replace it, period.
Anyway I'm babbling, all the creative fanbois are pissed creative gave their chips up to then and didn't keep it in house for ever and are scared at what may come out will make their creative OEM cards look, and sound like crap
All I know is my wallet will be happy I spent the money on something that wont crash or reboot my computer randomly, or wont play a game because the sound card and games don't like each other, **cough cough nascar season 2003 and SB Z2 cough cough** all it did was give me god awful screeches from my speakers for 3 minutes, lock up my pc, crash it and reboot. Then there was my pc turning itself on when it was shut off, thought I had ghost, and of course it all went away when I removed the card and got another one. And that was just a bit of the troubles it gave me, I had more games that wouldn't play it became no longer worth having it. I hope the X-FI chip they worked out a bunch of the bugs, ha ha ha. Even if they didn't though, the music/movie end of the card will make up the diff for the game end drivers since no other card made by anyone else out there can come close to what their cards do on that end, I could live with some games not working right, to have my ears bleed with kick ass sounding music and movies, with occasional working games sounding kick ass as well.
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