C0deHunter wrote on 2025-01-20, 19:44:

Since I am going to use DosBox, the X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro (PCI) has even the good old serial joystick connector, so it might be a better choice!

That's not a joystick connector. It's Creative's proprietary AD_LINK port used for hooking up an external I/O unit.

As for which is better, is your Titanium card Fatal1ty branded as well? If not, it will have 16MB X-RAM instead of 64MB making it ever so slightly worse.

I thought the Dolby support on the PCI cards was down to licensing, and installing modded drivers like the Daniel K pack allowed it to work with other cards. My X-Fi is the PCI based Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1 which has the Dolby stuff.

I haven't used the PCIe versions. But at least for the Titanium PCIe Wikipedia mentions that Dolby Digital Live is handled in software on that. There was also struggles due to PCIe latency that the new chip had to content with. I'll stick with PCI to not have to worry about that.

If the PCIe card is the SB0880 then the only difference is the x-ram Joseph_Joestar mentioned which for me would make no difference.
For me I'd more work out how to maximise usage, eg if you use the pcie variant does this mean you can drop the PCI card in another PC?

I recently replaced a PCI X-Fi with an PCIe X-Fi in one of my machines because the PCIe slot was further from the GFX card, so better airflow. I'm not too worried about the amount of X-RAM personally.