which X-Fi to go for?
 

I am a bit on a budget and felt that fatality and elite pro is not within my range, my question is would X-Ram make a difference? Or I can do without and just go for xtreme music or Platinum? Any owners, your opinion is most appreciated.

The X-RAM is promising, but in reality there is not enough support for it, and even the games which do support it show no noticeable improvement; it's not worth the extra cost.

consult this great review at TechReport , and do read the conclusion as it will clear things up for you:)
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/20...y/index.x?pg=1

I got Fatal1ty and it works great. I can't tell if there is improvement from non X-RAM version as I do not own 2nd X-Fi.
X-RAM allows storing game sound samples in kind of sound cache memory and I am a big supporter of cache for anything as this is the way to go to avoid bottlenecks. Any game that allows you to select 128 voices takes advantage of it: well known BF2, and Quake 4 but also titles such Evolution GT or Ghost Recon... For some reason this is not advertised and you do not know how many voices there are until you buy the game, which is lame. All in all: if you have money get X-RAM. But if have only 512 RAM get normal RAM first.

you might want to keep this in mind also if you consider buying Creative products: http://www.madshrimps.be/forums/show...ght=creativ e

That's lame. NGO tries to make people panic (see my other post in the thread you linked to) but I have X-Fi and I run into no problems. As soon as I posted that I have no problems they banned me. So believe what you want. X-Fi as such is a very good sound card. You can argue about X-RAM: I think it is a right concept but whether it is well implemented and if people like it - we will see...

it's not about trying to let people panic, it's about sharing the news about the amount of troubles creative cards cause in some systems, Audigy, Audigy 2 or X-fi

I bought the X-Fi platinium. works right the first time I installed it on my XP 64 bit. I noticed it hasn't got a heatsink, was worried at first if I have gotten an older version but realised everything works great. Installed BF 2 and had quite a fun game :)

I read the NGOHQ article, it is at best a sensationalised article. The writing reeks of bias and doesn't look to be researched properly and looked like some 12 yr old work

while the problems with the X-Fi and Audigy 2 only affect a minority, it's still an issue; the support received when reporting an issue is only not enough to resolve issues because there are some weird (?) conflicts with certain motherboard/chipset combinations.

Audigy2 might work great in P4 system but cause hard lockups on A64 nforce4 system, things like that, hard to troubleshoot for Creative, also hard to work with for customers if their products is the cause of much grief.

as with this unlucky XBOX owner he didn't stop complaining, even the smallest number of problem users, when making enough noise, can cause things to change:)

Right but if majority of people with nForce4 boards and A64 systems do not run into troubles do you really think it is the sound card that is to be blamed? Weird problems occur with PCs all the time and everyone came across them...Some people decide to post about it. Creative forums are well known rant boards for attention seeking teens. Ever used them? Try to communicate with these kids...
Also no-one will post that they "have no problems and are happy" So if you google for 6600+problems or nvidia+problems or whatever+ problems you are guaranteed to get gazillions of hits. It does not prove anything.

I run my X-Fi in nForce4 Asus A8N32-SLI board and have no troubles. So do many other people. But I hope for new drivers to come anytime soon, too.
It's high time, Creative ;)

@jmke: in regard to Audigy try latest driver I linked to in the other thread. kX are good but no EAX...You better off dump them, run ctzapxx.exe for cleaning purposes and then install the latest Audigy driver. Good Luck!

if you look through the links I posted in the other thread you see that the people who posted either resolved their issue by swapping out soundcard (bye bye creative) or using kxdriver.

in my system ONLY with the kxdriver I'm able to use the soundcard, any creative driver results in system lockups.