Sound Blaster X-Fi cards that use the E-mu 20k chips support EAX.

Auzentech X-Fi HomeTheater HD also supports EAX.

Shouldn't the Audigy Rx and most X-Fi support it?

On paper all of them support EAX, but not every card has hardware support.

Azrael128 wrote on 2025-07-02, 18:25:

Shouldn't the Audigy Rx and most X-Fi support it?

Added bonus for Audigy Rx (if you dual boot) is that Creative has official Windows 11 drivers for it that are compatible with Core Isolation.

I've been testing a generic CMI8738 audio chip behind an Asmedia PCIE-to-PCI bridge with vanilla Windows 2000 on my new retro rocket (i7-9700k / Z370 board):

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07R191M25?ref=ppx_ … _fed_asin_title

The Windows XP / 2000 drivers provide support for EAX 1.0 and 2.0. I suspect it does EAX in software, but my retro rocket has so much compute power that I can't notice any impact. It sounds a lot like a SB Live! in EAX mode to my ears.

I'd rather use an Audigy or X-Fi with Windows 2000, but neither PCIE-based card has fully compatible Windows 2000 drivers for the vanilla kernel.

Barley wrote on 2025-07-02, 20:03:

Added bonus for Audigy Rx (if you dual boot) is that Creative has official Windows 11 drivers for it that are compatible with Core Isolation.

This is the best choice considering the official drivers from Windows XP to Windows 11. Most of EAX games are created in WinXP era with DirectSound3D API.
Not all PCIE X-Fi's have official WinXP support.

Looks like Audigy Rx would be a good pick since it appears to have toslink and i'm intending to run xp/7 on this pc. (technically win10 runs well, but i'm not sure how much gaming i can get away with on an i7-3820 with a gtx 960 on w10 - Linux might be a better pick for a 3rd wheel OS)

Thanks 😀

mzlink wrote on 2025-07-03, 11:10:

Looks like Audigy Rx would be a good pick since it appears to have toslink and i'm intending to run xp/7 on this pc. (technically win10 runs well, but i'm not sure how much gaming i can get away with on an i7-3820 with a gtx 960 on w10 - Linux might be a better pick for a 3rd wheel OS)

Thanks 😀

If you're only going to do Windows XP/7, then the core isolation problem does not exist. In that case, you can probably expand your search to all the X-Fi cards EXCEPT the X-Fi Xtreme Audio, which does not have hardware acceleration.

Barley wrote on 2025-07-03, 17:52:

mzlink wrote on 2025-07-03, 11:10:

Looks like Audigy Rx would be a good pick since it appears to have toslink and i'm intending to run xp/7 on this pc. (technically win10 runs well, but i'm not sure how much gaming i can get away with on an i7-3820 with a gtx 960 on w10 - Linux might be a better pick for a 3rd wheel OS)

Thanks 😀

If you're only going to do Windows XP/7, then the core isolation problem does not exist. In that case, you can probably expand your search to all the X-Fi cards EXCEPT the X-Fi Xtreme Audio, which does not have hardware acceleration.

Primarily xp/7 yes. The issue is the majority of cards i see for sale is pci and not pcie and sourcing an adapter + pci card costs more or same as some pcie cards

Also: toslink isn't available on all pci-e cards

Even though the Audigy Rx is the newer card it's still part of the Audigy family and based off the older CA10300 EMU which supports up to EAX4

Most the X-Fi range uses the newer EMU20K1 and supports EAX5, namely
SB1040 / Xtreme Audio PCI Express
SB0880 / Titanium
SB0886 / Titanium Fatal1ty (Champion or Professional)

As noted above the SB0790/ X-Fi Xtreme Audio is a low budget card with no hardware acceleration.
The SB1270 / X-Fi Titanium HD has no WinXP support

It might be that you don't need the later version of EAX
https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/List_of_ … ith_EAX_support

My hearing isn't good enough for me to consider myself an audiophile but I have 2 X-Fi cards, the PCI SB0770 and PCIe SB0880 and can notice the difference when compared to a Audigy 2ZS.
But don't notice less of a difference between say an Audigy 2 and SBLive!

chinny22 wrote on 2025-07-04, 01:17:

As noted above the SB0790/ X-Fi Xtreme Audio is a low budget card with no hardware acceleration.
The SB1270 / X-Fi Titanium HD has no WinXP support

Thank you for calling out the incompatibility of the SB1270 / X-Fi Titanium HD with Windows XP, as I had neglected to do.

I found an Audigy Rx locally for a decent price so i have ordered it.