Is any of this going to work without chipset drivers for XP?

infiniteclouds wrote:

chinny22 wrote:

Short answer yes, Basically for XP you want one with the EMU20K2 chip. Below gives the names to the different bundles and what t […]
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infiniteclouds wrote:

Are all of the none-HD Titaniums XP compatible and good for Windows XP? It's confusing because I see ones that are labelled SB0880 where some have a sheath/cover over them and others don't.

Short answer yes, Basically for XP you want one with the EMU20K2 chip.
Below gives the names to the different bundles and what the differences are which is why SB0880 gives mixed results
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster_X … Fi#X-Fi_line-up.

Is there any reliable way to tell based on appearance? They only seem to have SB0880 and all have an "X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity" logo on them. I imagine there are a ton of listings mislabeled as being Titanium EMU20K2 chips that actually are not.

Edit:

Okay, it looks like all of tahe PCI-e Titanium cards are EMU20K2 EXCEPT for the HD (easily identifiable) and "OEM Titanium". These are clearly identifiable since instead of an X-Fi badge they have a CA20K2 chip on them..

Are these PCI-e cards compatible with the 32-bit version of XP, by the way? I noticed one of the boxes said Windows XP-64 bit.

CA20K should be the same as EMU20K. Also all X-FI card excluding Titanium HD should be compatible with XP 32

God Of Gaming wrote:

CA20K should be the same as EMU20K. Also all X-FI card excluding Titanium HD should be compatible with XP 32

Not sure about the HD part but I did extensive research into the BEST video/sound for an XP32 system that's still going to work with modern games and stuff and the best combo I found (and which works just fine on my system right now) is an X-Fi Titanium PCI-E and an R9 270X which is the last ati card with drivers for XP. If you did what I did and got an 8 core processor at 4.5GHz the Video will be the bottleneck but 2 R9s in crossfire will perfectly balance it out.

R9 280X should work in XP as well. Though, depending on which games you want to play, you might find that both those cards have compatibility issues with some old games, just keep it in mind.

R9 270x is almost the same exact card as an HD 7870.

The R9 280X (no drivers for XP), is pretty much the same as the HD 7970 Ghz, which does have drivers for XP.
Do the 270X drivers for XP work with the 280X ????

The HD 7970 will blow the 270X / 7870 away without even trying.

I had a couple of HD 7870 cards for about 1 week. I was not impressed. Then I upgraded to a HD 7970 and then to dual HD 7970s once I found a second one that was a good price.

Due to the more advanced technological support of the R9 series as compared to the 7x series and the fact that driver support (if it exists at all) would be sparse after the 270, I'd still go with the 270 - just buy 2 of them. They are some of the most economical cards in ATI's lineup.

The OP has bought their card but for others researching, the audio delivered by a Geforce over HDMI or even DVI is actually pretty good and doesn't have the issue of missing audio alerts because of waking from a low power state.

How do those ATI cards handle very early earliest Windows XP games? No compatibility issues with games from 2001/2002?

well, I used to have a HD 4850 and later HD 7950 and currently using GTX 780 in my winXP/win7 dualboot PC (also using auzentech x-fi hometheater hd, my favorite x-fi sound card, it has ca20k2 chip btw) and after switching from 4850 to 7950, I noticed some old games stopped working correctly, most notably Serious Sam (broken graphics in OpenGL mode, stutter in Direct3D mode) and NFS Hot Pursuit 2 (broken graphics). Sold the 7950 to cryptominers at a profit and bought the GTX 780 and havent had any issues since. But Im starting to regret selling it, wish I still had it to test more games and find out all that are broken and document them, as mentioning just 2 doesnt sound so convincing 😀 (p.s. just remembered, Far Cry had corrputed distant textures when you zoom in with binoculars or sniper on 7950 too, that makes 3 games that I know of, and who knows how many that I havent tried)

At any rate Im fairly sure R9 280X works with the 14.4 catalyst for XP32, tho, you can always get a 7970 too, not like theres much of a difference. But I think a GTX 980Ti is probably the best card for a winXP/win7 dualboot, Im thinking of upgrading my GTX 780 to that once I find one on the cheap 😀 And I don't like using multi-gpu cards and SLI/Crossfire setups, very few games support that and even those that do may display microstutter issues and low min fps, its best to just get one fast card imo. 3dfx is the exclusion since they don't use AFR

It seems like generally nVidia cards are better for spanning long periods of games without issues...