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.
I/O, I/O,
It's off to disk I go,
With a bit and a byte
And a read and a write,
I/O, I/O