Great sound for a great price

When I finally decided to get a sound card for my computer I had a lot of researching to do, being a gamer and music lover, I'd never taken more than a casual interest in the quality of audio in my PC. My first and foremost worry was squeezing out as many FPS (Frames Per Second) as I could on my relatively budget PC in gaming terms. After talking with a co-worker and reading a bit into the world of sound cards I decided one would be a worthy upgrade and the price range they generally fall in was well within my reach. So I started reading up on different cards and manufacturers to try and decide which would be the best for me and my needs. And so I give you the Creative Technology Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer.

Let me start by saying Creative's X-Fi Series has been praised up and down throughout the PC community by several publications, including PC Magazine, Maximum PC and others. So even if after reading this you think maybe the XtremeGamer card isn't the card for you, there are still quite a few great choices in the X-Fi family.

I picked the card up at my local Best Buy for around $105 dollars and it is currently selling on Newegg.com for $69.99, so it's not too bad on the budget. Installation was simple and easy, all you have to do is open up your case, slide the card in an open PCI slot, hook up your speakers and install the driver (the cd-rom is included in box). Overall I would say installation took about 30 minutes from start to finish, and most of that time was waiting for the drivers to install. The requirements for the card are as follows:

Windows XP with Service Pack 2
1 GHz Pentium 3 or AMD Processor or greater
Available PCI 2.1 slot
256 MB RAM
600 MB of free Hard Drive space
CD-ROM/CD-RW or CD/DVD-ROM for software installation

So even users with slightly older PCs can benefit from the cards abilities.

The software for the card comes with 3 different modes; Gaming Mode, Entertainment Mode, and Audio Creation Mode.
The mode I use most would be Game Mode, which let's the card take the audio processing task away from your onboard audio giving you a bit of gain in your games performance. This is where the card really surprised me, I benchmarked my system running Day of Defeat before installing the card and after and saw an average increase of about 10 FPS. Also the EAX audio really helps immerse you in the gaming experience compared to the onboard audio already in my computer.

Next I've been using Audio Creation Mode alot, which really gives you a lot of options and abilities when ripping music from CDs onto your computer, or burning files from your computer onto a cd. My only real problem with this is there's no ripping to .mp3 format straight out of the box, if you want to do that you have to download another driver from Creative's website and it will run you about $9. After forking over the $100 for the card I thought this was a bit of a cheap tactic. Luckily to listen to music and to burn cds, you can still use the WMA format that comes standard without any problems, and in good quality.

Finally comes Entertainment Mode which is mainly to enhance the sound of your music and movies that you are listening to or watching on your computer. Again I was really surprised by the quality that the card displayed here. I put in a cd I'd heard a thousand times over, and never had it sounded to good as when I played it through this. It also features software to improve the audio quality of songs you may have ripped onto your computer at a less than desirable bit-rate, which is fantastic.

So if you're looking to really get an overall boost out of your computer in just about everything entertainment related, I highly recommend looking into the X-Fi cards. Creative has really put out a product that does a fantastic job, and is affordable to everyone.

Technical Specs (as found on us.creative.com)

-24-bit Analog-to-Digital conversion of analog inputs at 96kHz sample rate
-24-bit Digital-to-Analog conversion of digital sources at 96kHz to analog 7.1 speaker output
-24-bit Digital-to-Analog conversion of stereo digital sources at 192kHz to stereo output
-16-bit to 24-bit recording sampling rates: 8, 11.025, 16, 22.05, 24, 32, 44.1, 48 and 96kHz
-ASIO 2.0 support at 16-bit/44.1kHz, 16-bit/48kHz, 24-bit/44.1kHz 24-bit/48kHz and 24-bit/96kHz with direct monitoring
-Enhanced SoundFont support at up to 24-bit resolution

For More Information
http://us.creative.com/products/product.asp?category=209&subcategory=669&product=15853
http://us.creative.com
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16829102006