Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Sound Card

The Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer sound card delivers faster audio performance and intense, realistic sound in all your games. Headphone surround sound is better too – so good, you will swear you are listening to multichannel speakers – and your games will sound richer as you hear all of the crisp, clear highs and bone-crushing lows you have been missing. It is Sound Blaster…on steroids.

Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Sound Card (70SB073A00000)

Features

• Device Type - Sound card
• Interface Type - PCI
• Localization - English
• Sound Output Mode - 7.1

User Reviews

Pros:

This is the cheapest member of the true X-Fi family and also the best bang for the buck.

The first time I heard this card I was blown away! Compared to on-board audio, its pretty much night and day.

You will notice deep lows and rich mids, along with very clear highs. This card has everything you need and probably the best sound you can get under $100.

This thing even made bad speakers sound good. When you hook up good speakers or good earphones to this sound card, you will realize why it is important to have quality sound hardware.

This has true EAX support, not emulated as others.

The processor on the XtremeGamer actually takes the audio load from your CPU to increase performance by a few %.


Cons:

Creative software has a terrible repuation for problems and bloatware but don't let that judge the hardware! I think Creative is improving quickly.

Never use the disk which hardware comes with and always download the latest drivers from the manufacturer website.


Other Thoughts:

Great sound, great quality, and extreme potential with good speakers or good headphones.

Probably the best bang for the buck $100 or under. -- Excellent sound card for gaming and music!

The card and driver installed just fine. It drove my high-impedance headphones. Games now sound good with EAX, unlike my experience ten years ago where voice chat and voice overs got distorted. So, if it wasn't for the BSOD I'd probably give it 5 stars.

Unfortunately, this card is extremely susceptible to ground loops. Noise from a ground loop appears capable of bleeding into the digital circuits. A lot of folks incorrectly blame Creative's drivers, which is one of the two primary causes of the BSOD. The other cause is bad hardware, which is what we have here.

My ground loop was introduced by my powered speakers. These speakers allow for two inputs, but don't do anything special to isolated grounds. With a second PC plugged in to the speakers, the faint hum of a ground loop can be heard. In this state, when using X-Fi hardware, my machine crashes regularly.

I fixed the problem by using a Griffin Noise Reducing Audio Cable for the second PC. This is a small transformer that isolates the ground at the cost of a slight loss in signal quality. With the second PC not plugged in or using the transformer, I have not seen a single crash.

The system crashes also never happen when using the integrated sound instead of the X-Fi even though the same hum can be heard in this configuration. -- Groud loops cause blue screens aka BSOD

I had never replaced a sound card in my computers but my son insisted that I would really like having this particular Creative product. Course, he knows I am not a gamer at all but he insisted it would make my music sound much better so I trusted him and bought this sound card.

I can say I was MORE than pleased, it makes my computer room sound like a concert venue sometimes, I can get lost in the sound. My movies sparkle too, I close the door turn everything up loud and revel in hearing all the detail that I missed before I got the Sound Blaster.

So, I recommend this product to everybody, even middle aged ladies like me, its way cool to hear everything I missed before I bought this product.

Enjoy!!! -- Spectacular Sound!!

Considering the price I paid, this was an excellent buy. I've seen it on the Web for a much higher price. The sound is outstanding, and installation was simple. Would consider this a really great purchase. -- Excellent product

Please keep in mind before reading this that I am NOT an audiophile.

Now, the primary reasons I bought this card were that it was on sale here for sixty five dollars, and because I read everywhere that it boosts performance by removing the audio processing load from the cpu. I currently run a Phenom II X4 945 and a Radeon HD 5770 which isn't amazing in the world of i7 setups, but I still might not be seeing as big of an improvement as some entry level systems would. In any case after properly configuring the card, it boosted my framerate by about 5-10fps depending on the game. Some games I was lucky to get one or two frame improvements out of. It sounds good, and is a definite improvement over my onboard audio, but I still don't think it's worth the full one hundred dollar price tag.

I also think it's worth mentioning that mine never came with the Vista install cd. Only XP and a demo disk. I didn't really care because I run Windows 7 and I've read other reviews talking about compatibility issues with 7 and the Vista drivers anyway, and it was no big deal to head over to creatives site and spend about ten min downloading everything I needed. On that note, the software interface looks cool, but is in need of some simplification and could be very confusing to some. -- Not the performance booster I was hoping for