Product Description

There's so much focus on video and graphics when it comes to games. But that's only part of the experience. What if you couldn't hear the blasts, bombs, explosions, tackles, and grunts? That's why your available PCI slot in your desktop needs this Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme sound card for PCI. The Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card delivers faster audio performance and intense, realistic sound in all your games. Headphone surround sound is better too?so good, you'll swear you're listening to multichannel speakers?and your games will sound richer as you hear all of the crisp, clear highs and bone-crushing lows you've been missing. Revitalize your compressed game sounds with X-Fi Crystalizer and hear crisp, sharp gunshots and deep, booming explosions for the most intense gaming experience ever X-Fi Crystalizer repairs the damage that MP3 and WMA compression causes and intelligently enhances high and low frequencies for cleaner music playback and more realistic movie sound Delivers THX certified surround sound and includes Cyberlink PowerDVD software with DTS and Dolby Digital-EX decoding via free download for an unbeatable DVD movie watching experience X-Fi CMSS-3D matches the sound to your headphones or multichannel speakers and positions specific audio elements?such as voice in the center and ambient sounds in surrounding channels, so your music and movies sound more alive A dedicated audio creation mode supports near transparent conversion between any resolutions, digital-matched recording, low-latency ASIO support and more

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3581 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Creative Labs
• Model: 70SB073A00000
• Dimensions: 7.00" h x 4.00" w x 10.00" l, 3.00 pounds

Features

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

From the Manufacturer

Features

Turbo charge your gaming experience with Xtreme Fidelity audio!
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'll swear you're listening to multichannel speakers--and your games will sound richer as you hear all of the crisp, clear highs and bone-crushing lows you've been missing. It's Sound Blaster...on steroids!

Xtreme Fidelity Gaming

Get the speed you need when every second counts
Win big with a powerful, completely new audio processing engine that boosts real game performance by up to 15% over motherboard audio and still gives you the fullest audio effects possible!

Hear your enemies before they find you X-Fi CMSS®-3D Headphone creates nine virtual speakers over stereo headphones for positional audio that's so accurate you can actually locate enemies by sound. Multichannel speakers are even better with audio cues that let you hear exactly where they are--even between speakers.

	Immerse yourself in a new dimension of sound Bullets whiz past your head. Explosions shake the room. Take reality to the next level with EAX® ADVANCED HD™ sound effects in games.
	Get lost in the details Revitalize your compressed game sounds with X-Fi Crystalizer™ and hear crisp, sharp gunshots and deep, booming explosions for the most intense gaming experience ever.

Xtreme Fidelity Entertainment

	Restore the details and vibrance to your music and movies X-Fi Crystalizer technology restores the detail and vibrance to your compressed music and movies. All the highs and lows are intelligently enhanced so you'll hear everything in crystal clarity.
	X-Fi CMSS-3D technology expands your stereo MP3s and digital movies into surround sound over multichannel speakers, stereo speakers or even headphones. Voices are centered in front of you and ambient sounds are moved all around you.

Enjoy truly cinematic movie sound
The Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card delivers THX® certified surround sound and includes Cyberlink's PowerDVD software with DTS™ and Dolby Digital®-EX decoding via free download for an unbeatable DVD movie watching experience. (Internet connection is required)

Xtreme Fidelity Audio Creation

Get the most advanced features and effects for music and audio creation available in a consumer solution.

• Near transparent conversion to and from any resolution
• Digital-matched recording capabilities in resolutions from 44.1kHz to 96kHz
• ASIO support with as low as one millisecond latency
• Up to eight different hardware effects
• 24-bit SoundFont® sampling, and 3D MIDI

Customer Reviews

great sound
Installation took a little while but seemed to go ok. The sound is unbelieveably better than my onboard sound. Before purchasing this I went to a lot of forums and almost decided to not get this because so many people said there would be no noticeable difference between this card and my onboard sound. They could not have been more wrong. These ears are 50 years old and I'm by no means an audiophile but the difference to me is like night and day. The sound is so much better it is actually a pleasure to use my computer for listening to music now. I initally wanted to get a sound card to take some of the load off my cpu for games. It seems to help with games running better, less stutter-etc. There does seem to be some minor compatability issues though. My computer sleep function has been essentually disabled now and there are known issues with this by quite a few people on the net. There doesn't seem to be any answer for it as yet that I have been able to find. With computers if everything goes right something is probably wrong so I can live with the trade off of no sleep function for better sound. So far I'm very pleased with this card.

Great Card
Bought this to replace onboard sound. Easy install, Vista recognized it immediately. Ton of options, actually more than I use. I love the X-Fi Crystalizer, makes a huge difference with mp3's.

Big Improvement in sound but drivers can be a hassle
Easy installation. Remove all sound drivers from device manager. Open case, insert sound card. Turn on computer. Windows finds it and asks for the install disk. Put in install disk and install. Do a computer restart and I GOT THE BLACK SCREEN OF DEATH. After trying several different work arounds, including a windows repair I had to send my computer to a shop and have the harddrive formatted and Windows reinstalled. We can't prove the software caused the crash but I haven't had any problems until I installed this software. Even with a clean hardrive and fresh operating system I still had to install the software twice to get it to work.

But now that it is installed and working properly the sound is a vast improvement over the motherboard sound. I'm using the Logitec X-540 5.1 speakers and the sound is crisp, clean and clear. If the install would have went smoothly I would have given this 5 stars.

If I had to do it again I would not use the software but go directly to the Creative Sound website and load the updated driver directly from them.

My computer is less than a year old. I'm running windows XP, 2 gig ram on an Asus M2N32 SLI Deluxe Motherboard with an AMD 64 X2 Dual Core Processor. I use Spysweeper and keep it up to date.