Both sound cards support Windows XP just fine and the difference between the Fatal1ty PCI and the regular Titanium PCIe variants are fairly minor. The most important one is that the Fatal1ty has 64 MB RAM onboard for the X-RAM feature which very few titles supported it and was used to avoid storing non-streaming samples into the motherboard RAM.

As for using a SB X-Fi sound card in Windows 11, irrelevant to be honest. The advantages of audio hardware acceleration have diminished at this point and there are suitable alternatives to handle SF2 SoundFonts, HRTF and EAX. Onboard audio has matured and adding a dedicated sound card only makes sense if you want to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.

Either card will work pretty much equally well under Windows XP, aside from the X-RAM that not a lot of games used. In terms of using the PCI-E X-Fi on a modern system, my advice is to try it out and see if you like how it sounds better than your on-board audio. I have a Xonar DSX (slightly better audio quality than the X-Fi) that sounds a little bit different than my Gigabyte X470 Aorus Ultra's on-board audio, but aside from picking up a bit more coil whine from my previous 1070 Ti (which could be charitably considered a "noisy SOB" of a graphics card electrically) with the motherboard's audio I couldn't hear much of a difference. I ended up demoting the Xonar to my Windows Vista capture machine, and have been sticking with the on-board audio for my modern PC.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-12-13, 16:30:

the X-RAM feature which very few titles supported

I understand that this feature only really helped on rather low end systems (and why would splurge on a high end sound card for such a system when you'd better off upgrading other components), but still - is there a list of those titles? As far as I can tell it got released alongside the EAX5 (or maybe late -4) SDK, so I'd expect it to be a subset of the EAX4/5 supporting games?

elszgensa wrote on 2023-12-13, 20:34:

I understand that this feature only really helped on rather low end systems (and why would splurge on a high end sound card for such a system when you'd better off upgrading other components), but still - is there a list of those titles?

I don't know if there's a list of games that use X-RAM, but from my own testing, I can say that Doom 3, Quake 4 and Prey all use it, since they share the same engine. They check the sound card and list the exact amount of X-RAM that it has on-board. You can see this if you open up the console and scroll up to where the sound system is initialized. Relevant screenshot here. It's not limited to EAX5 since Doom 3 uses it while only going up to EAX4.

I think Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142 use it as well, but those are true EAX5 games. Unreal Tournament 2004 with the EAX5 patch applied uses it as well.

One nice thing about Creative cards in general is one click stereo surround expansion via CMSS. If you have surround speakers, this mirrors stereo sources to the rear channels. The X-Fis also sound pretty good and have decent I/O if you have the expansion bay (MIDI). Not that it matters to most people, these cards have ASIO drivers as well if you do DAW work.

I have a Titanium in my W11 rig. EAX may be dead but CMSS-3D is still great.

Agree, I'd choose depending on if you wanted to go with PCI or PCI-E more then the card itself.
I also upgraded from the onboard ADI1984A to a X-FI OEM SB0770 card, sound was much better in Win7

Great information as always guys, this is the one forum I know I will learn a lot every time I post a question.

Sounds like I should use the PCI card on my XP rig and give the PCI-E card a try on my modern machine.