You won't be able to tell the difference unless you have pretty high end speakers or headphones.

A good set of used cans will generally set you back about $100-$300 depending on how high you go.

A good set I can recommend is the Sennheiser HD630VB. Listening to music on YouTube and there are much higher frequencies that can be heard than even on a set of Sennheiser Momentum which are way better than any cans I previously had.

"X-Fi Xtreme Audio" is the one you don't want.

The rest are fine.

Titanium HD dropped WinXP support, the other "Titanium" branded cards are fine though.

cyclone3d wrote on 2022-01-18, 06:30:

You won't be able to tell the difference unless you have pretty high end speakers or headphones.

Yeah I probably should have said I'm not using Koss multimedia speakers 😁. I have some Audio Technica ATH-AD700 headphones at the PC.

chinny22 wrote on 2022-01-18, 13:47:

Titanium HD dropped WinXP support, the other "Titanium" branded cards are fine though.

I haven't tried it with XP myself but you are right! Interesting. So that card is not a good candidate.

mothergoose729 wrote on 2022-01-17, 23:31:

Yep, just that easy. I pulled the hard drive between installations to avoid the windows installer getting its own ideas. […]
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Demo85 wrote on 2022-01-17, 09:06:

mothergoose729 wrote on 2022-01-17, 09:01:

GRUB or another boot loader should be able to do it. Personally, I just install them on separate hard drives and switch the boot priority in the bios.

Would that really work? If I install XP to a drive, yank it, then install 10 to another. Plug them all in at the same time (plus a third shared drive) I could just use the boot menu to toggle what OS boots?

Yep, just that easy. I pulled the hard drive between installations to avoid the windows installer getting its own ideas.

swaaye wrote on 2022-01-17, 21:31:

Demo85 wrote on 2022-01-17, 07:05:

So for the X-Fi, I see a million different versions. Do they all have hardware EAX? What flavor of X-Fi should I be looking at? Am I going to be able to get plan 2 channel audio going in Win10?

Look for any XFi with at least one RAM chip next to the audio processor. If EAX 5 is appealing to you then find one with 64MB RAM but there are really only a handful of games that might do something with this and I'm not sure it's actually tangible. I think if there are 2 RAM chips it is a 64MB configuration.

Yeah they all support the full range of channel outputs. Up to 5.1 or 7.1.

Yeah, any X-Fi card is just as good for games. That is why I recommend the X-Fi Extreme Music or SB0770 because they are cheaper, they support EAX 5, and they have hardware acceleration. The X-Fi titanium has 64mb of RAM and so it can hardware accelerate a little harder, but it so doesn't make any meaningful difference. Even back in the core2duo days the difference was like a handful of FPS in some titles, with your 2600k you will never, ever notice the difference. Even if you get the value cards that do EAX 100% in software it will be fine.

swaaye wrote on 2022-01-18, 03:34:

mothergoose729 wrote on 2022-01-17, 23:31:

Yeah, any X-Fi card is just as good for games. That is why I recommend the X-Fi Extreme Music or SB0770 because they are cheaper, they support EAX 5, and they have hardware acceleration. The X-Fi titanium has 64mb of RAM and so it can hardware accelerate a little harder, but it so doesn't make any meaningful difference. Even back in the core2duo days the difference was like a handful of FPS in some titles, with your 2600k you will never, ever notice the difference. Even if you get the value cards that do EAX 100% in software it will be fine.

Oh yeah definitely. I have used a mix of the PCI, PCIe, 2MB, 16MB, 64MB X-Fi cards over the years and they all seem the same in the end. I even picked up the Titanium HD out of curiosity and I can't tell the difference between all its fancy analog circuitry and the output of even the plain Titanium. Or an Audigy 2 for that matter heh.

I did just buy a X-Fi Titanium off Ebay, it was 28 shipped. I'll keep in mind that the lower end X-Fi are functionally the same for any other retro builds i'm doing. Can't wait to get this computer together. See I have a Dell Dimension 4100 with a bad motherboard. I always wanted to use that style of case for a retro build. Well I finally came across a Dell 990 with a beat to hell case. Going to put the guts of the 990 in the 4100. Have the 4100 case all apart now, gonna scrub with soap and water and maybe some magic eraser. Then reassemble.

cyclone3d wrote on 2022-01-18, 06:30:

You won't be able to tell the difference unless you have pretty high end speakers or headphones.

A good set of used cans will generally set you back about $100-$300 depending on how high you go.

A good set I can recommend is the Sennheiser HD630VB. Listening to music on YouTube and there are much higher frequencies that can be heard than even on a set of Sennheiser Momentum which are way better than any cans I previously had.

Going all the way back to my first computer I always used a home stereo and bookshelf speakers. So yeah I got good speakers and a few really nice set of cans as well. I'm kinda torn though. For the retro look I really want a old set of Boston Acoustic or other retro beige computer speaker but I know they won't sound as good as my Buchardt S400 but I dunno if I can get the feel I want. When I was 15 I had a hand me down Kenwood deck and a set of Yamaha speakers I trashed picked and cleaned up.