Worth upgrading from SB Live to X-FI

Hi,

purely from a gaming point of view, is it worth upgrading from SB Live to X-FI? If the vote is yes, which one? ExtremeGamer or ExtremeMusic, - they are in the same price range and the others are too expensive and the entry-level one I read is not the real deal.
I've got Creative 5.1 speaker set - not the digital ones.
Questions are:
Will I get a performance / framerate gain in games thats worthwhile?
Will I experience better sound given my speaker setup?

If anyone can please give my advise on this.
Much appreciated.

If your aim is to produce the mest possible sound environment for your games, then the answer is definitely yes. The same goes for music playback and audio composition. The two just cannot compare. It is like asking if a Dual-core CPU is better than a Pentium I. It is the next step.

Concerning the framerates and performance, there will be little or no improvement as this is subject to the speed of your CPU and graphics subsystem.

I found this response on a forum where someone asked more or less the same question:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/176127-10-music-versus-onboard-live

The Extreme Gamer card is obviously more suitable for playing games as it comes with onboard memory designed
to store the high-quality samples that games use.

X-fi has serious issues with vista if you going to have that OS go to the creative forums and have a read. I have the X-fi fatality pretty good but can't use ultra high sound in bf2 since i got vista as it just crashes (bf2 that is). But when i had it in XP it was fantastic. Also you may want to have a look as some other non creative brand cards some are on par with creative.

If im not mistaken the ExtremeGamer and ExtremeMusic is just a re bagged Audigy 2..If u google it u might found out more info..

I'll stick to my SB Live! 5.1 until I can afford an X-Fi Elite Pro

X-fi has serious issues with vista

Click to expand...

Well I haven't had any problems...

The SB Live! is barely better than most onboard sound devices these days. I'd say it would be a justifiable upgrade.

If im not mistaken the ExtremeGamer and ExtremeMusic is just a re bagged Audigy 2..If u google it u might found out more info..

Click to expand...

Actually both of those use the new X-Fi architecture. The XtremeMusic has been discontinued in favour of the XtremeGamer, but they're very similar... The XtremeGamer just uses a smaller PCB.

Only the "XtremeAudio" still uses the old architecture. Stay away from that one.

general_koffi said:

Well I haven't had any problems...

The SB Live! is barely better than most onboard sound devices these days. I'd say it would be a justifiable upgrade.



Actually both of those use the new X-Fi architecture. The XtremeMusic has been discontinued in favour of the XtremeGamer, but they're very similar... The XtremeGamer just uses a smaller PCB.

Only the "XtremeAudio" still uses the old architecture. Stay away from that one.

Click to expand...

Ah ok cool..thanks for clearing that up...Im capped on international so yeah else i would have double checked

Another vote "For" the X-Fi. I went from a Live! to an XtremeAudio (or the XtremeGamer now) and I love the improvement in audio quality.

2 things bother me:

1) No Linux drivers

2) I dislike the drivers. Creative include a bunch of services that are totally inapplicable to my card. For example, there's a "helper" for the front-panel controls. Which do not exist with the XtremeAudio bundle. I'm trying to find out which of the 4 or 5 apps that are launched are not really used at all.

Lets see if you can revive a thread as old as this. Almost two years later I went and did the upgrade - finally! I got the (take breath)... Creative Sound Blaster X-FI Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series. Oh... and it's PCI Express. (breath out). Now this all sounds great and wonderful but this things got issues or I'm just too noob to know how the fix my problems.
To help you help me here's my PC specs:
Asus P5E board, Core 2 Quad Q6600, 2Gb mem, Asus 8800GT geforce card running Win XP SP2.
Firstly - when you try and change the mode after playing games then it just won't let you. I've read all posts far and wide and many seem to have the problem but I just couldn't find any solutions. Except for the obvious rebooting. I'm in the process of trying to get the latest drivers but that's a big mission cause my 3G connection is not fast enough plus i think the creative sites aren't the best also.
Secondly - I'm using a Creative 5.1 speaker setup which works just fine but when I connect my stereo headphones it's like I only hear some of the surround sound channels in games and not the main channels. It's like it thinks i've got 5.1 headphones and not 2.0 only. Once I thought that it's quite nice of this sound card to automatically switch from speakers to headphone when you plug in your headphones but now I don't know about this anymore.
Like I said - I'm really noob when it comes to sound and all the terminoligy / technology involved but I'm not asking for much from this card so I'm beginning to doubt it. Creative website is also useless when you try and solve problems like this.
Can anyone please help?