Creative to enter the motherboard market?

[MadAd]

I've just noticed This and This

"Sound Blaster Upgradeable
Bring Sound Blaster audio to your PC and turn your basic built-in sound into an exciting home-theater experience. Enjoy enhanced Music, Movie and Gaming audio from a simple upgrade that installs in a snap!"

Get the Sound Blaster Experience for your Motherboard Audio!


Ive not yet heard anything about this and wonder if others have? From the advertising it *looks* as if its a software add on (eax? proper surround etc?) based on the boards sound chip, with processing offloaded to the cpu. Right now we can only guess at what kind of performance impact that will have.

For unknown reasons creative have chosen to stay away from OEM partnerships to date, however from here, perhaps we might see more and more creative products associated with a mobo purchase - integrated audigys maybe? We can only hope.

 

[Concillian]

Yeah right, mobo manufacturers don't even want to pay for a decent quality codec chip when the price difference to the crappy Realtek POS they put on there is measured in pennies. They're going to pay the (likely) insane amounts Creative charges for their stuff? I doubt it will fly at a price that Creative and the OEMs/motherboard manufacturers can both be happy.

My view is tainted though. Any board that had an integrated Creative product in it would be one for me to specifically avoid.

 

[EtOH]

the old Gigabyte 8irxp had CL onboard sound. Not that new, just improved (if you can call any CL product that).