Here are pics of the cards I am choosing.

The only significant improvements I know of are with the EMU20K2 PCIe cards because they reduced the audio chip's sensitivity to bus latency. Added an embedded microcontroller or some such to process driver commands.

PCI XFi is more sensitive to bus issues than Audigy 2 in my experience. I still use one occasionally though. I have a Fatality 64MB + drive bay deal myself but don't remember which model offhand. I've also used the 64MB Elite Pro card in the past.

A few years ago I made a little firmware hack to enable hardware capabilities of higher end cards on those on the low end of the line. Or more precisely, to fool the drivers into thinking it's a different card and enable features disabled otherwise:

http://www.hardwareheaven.com/community/threa … -needed.199890/ (I go by jh1523 on other forums... such as VCF for instance)

Creative has since taken down the list of features in the X-fi series, but the internet archive still has it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100406044856/ht … aster/X-FiList/

And here's someone who replicated it, with more details on the practical aspects: http://xfimod.blogspot.com/

I did it because there was at some point an abundance of cheap SB0467 Dell OEM cards for which the drivers wouldn't enable all features, even though the card had the same hardware as the SB0460 (retail)

Sorry for the somewhat unrelated post. I have used my modded card for a while, then I got a Fatal1ty version, and frankly I didn't notice any differences in practical use. I think the hardware differences are pretty minor to insignificant.

Why did creative disable Dolby and DTS on the 2nd gen SB046A? Copyright protection? Or Is it just not needed anymore since current players can decode both. Also on the x gamer there are two (RAM chips?) compared to one on the SB0466 fatal1ty. Why is that? Could the EEPROM be flashed with the two pins next to the chip. I'm assuming that's what they are for.

RatCatcher wrote:

Why did creative disable Dolby and DTS on the 2nd gen SB046A? Copyright protection? Or Is it just not needed anymore since current players can decode both.

I don't know the exact reason Creative disabled it, but I could never get the hardware Dolby/DTS decoder to sound 100% right on my X-Fi Extreme Music. Most Dolby/DTS content was fine, but then it would distort badly during super loud movie scenes, no matter how low I set mixer levels. For example the hospital explosion scene in The Dark Knight produced extremely loud (and possibly damaging) distortion.

Software dolby/DTS decoding sounded just fine.

It was marketing. If you wanted a "premium" card with Dolby enabled you had to pay more. It is all done at driver level, all the cards have the required hardware but the driver would enable features based on the model of card it detected.

As for the RAM, the cards with one chip have actually more than the ones with two chips (64M vs 4M=2x2M). IIRC it's only used by the DSP to generate ambiances and such. It's not accessible to the user, and in fact it makes little difference. It's not used for samples, soundfonts etc - since the SB PCI those are held in the system RAM.

So after much studying. I came to the conclusion that the X-gamer board is the best layout in the PCI roundup. It is also the same board used in the Champion series. Only the EEPROM is flashed diffrent. It still baffles me that the FPS version has 64MB RAM when it looks like it has one RAM chip. If I'm wrong please correct me. Would like some insight on the two pins next to the EEPROM for flashing on these boards if anyone knows.

Memory is usually found in standard packages. The size of the package doesn't tell you how much RAM is inside.

RatCatcher wrote:

Why did creative disable Dolby and DTS on the 2nd gen SB046A?

In case decoding may be done in software by modern CPUs, then there is no sense to decode by driver and pay for Dolby license. They could to reduce self cost.

I think Creative's AC3 encode/decode support has always been CPU driven. Maybe I'm wrong though.

Could also be a cost / licencing issue?

swaaye wrote:

I think Creative's AC3 encode/decode support has always been CPU driven. Maybe I'm wrong though.

The AC3/DTS decoder on the PCI X-Fi is hardware based. To use it you have to tell your playback software to use S/PDIF output, and enable the internal decoder in Console Launcher. It definitely has a different sound than most software decoders. Like I mentioned a few posts above I could never get the hardware decoder to sound exactly right. Way too much distortion on LFE heavy tracks.

None of the PCI-E X-Fis had hardware AC3/DTS decoding.

I have never looked deep into the DDL decoding of the PCI editions. Interesting to hear that it did something in hardware.

DTS connect will work on digital output. No thanks. These cards work best for their analog outputs. There is trickery when connecting an analog 7.1 receiver with RCA jacks. You need two 4-pole 3.5mm to RCA adapters and one 3-pole RCA adapter. The side channels have a reversed polarity. So you will need to solder together two RCA adapters to flip the polarity and place them inline with the side channels. It's a cheap fix $8 USD max. Try to keep it all gold to the receiver if possible.