Creative PCI Express Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series Sound Card

Pros: none

Cons: Quit working after 1 month

Pros: -Creative ALchemy adds a nice touch to certain older games

Cons: -Crackles while Windows boots up
-Broke after a few months: front panel sound is full of crackling and whining noises
-The software is obese and each component has to install and uninstall separately, which takes forever.
-The software offers you a chance to save hundreds of MB's of downloaded files, but there is no obvious means to reuse them when reinsalling software later

Other Thoughts: I regret buying this card. The crackling took forever to figure out and I ended up just abandoning front panel audio.

Pros: the sound card is really good when use by it self ,good sound while gaming ,the front panel is CXXX.

Cons: The drivers for the sound card are not that great but able to work around it by just uninstalling and re installing drivers.NOW the front panel is not great at all the cables that are you used are bad and i mean bad ,if your not careful there will break or worst short out your card or panel.If you connect the hd cable from you computer case you might or will hear a horrible feed back from you speakers or headset .NOW the worst or the worst is there support, I've never had to deal with such bad support in my life,use less, when you go to the support page it i will just be a run around looking for a way just fix your problem ,and when take hours of you time and don't find your problem listed you'll have to send then a support email , don't bother they will never replay back .I will never buy another creative card again not for the card but for the bad support

Other Thoughts: STAY AWAY FOR CREATIVE OR BUY A Warranty FOR THE Seller ,and don't use there support page because it will be useless .been waiting for a month for replay form creative support all i want is to to see if i can get or buy a new front panel w/ cables ,that ant hard

Pros: Decided to go PCI-E with the sound card for my new build. Have had many SB soundcards in the past. This is a nice step up from my Audigy X-FI platinum PCI set up of my old system. Works great, sound is amazing!

Connection cables from front panel to card were plenty long enough to route out of sight.

Cons: none so far

Other Thoughts: My PCI-E X1 slot was blocked by my Graphics card installation (2 GTX 560's - SLI). Installed in the PCI-E X4 slot with no problems. ASUS Maximus IV Extreme-Z mobo.

Good price here on Newegg. Newegg service is outstanding and always treats me like a VIP.

Pros: it looks really cool and its convenient to have a Front panel connector because i dont want to have to plug my headphones into the back of my PC

Cons: Don't get me started on the piece of rubbish! First i have an Antec Lanboy Air case so i thought there wouldn't be a problem with connecting it inside my case. WRONG! when i plug it into the MoBo i have to actually lean it against the mount to screw it into place probably causing damage to my MoBo because of the stress its causing. and since it was at such a slant i couldn't plug anything into the back i/o panel like my computer speakers. I also bought the headset that went with this card thinking it would work well and heard about the voice changer-- Imagine those little toys you used as a kid to make your voice sound like a robot but worse-- once i put them on i was impressed with the comfort and sound cancelling technology, until i wore them for 5 minutes and got a headache from it digging into my head. and since the cheap wiring between the i/o panel and the card itself if you aren't playing sound through it it leaves a loud humm from interference.

Other Thoughts: i thought that buying the card with the headset would make it a better experience. what an idiot i was!

Pros: -Very easy to install
- Love the Volume Panel where I can change what I am doing if i want so i have better sound for that event, i.e. if i want to watch i movie i put it on Entertainment but if i want to play a FPS then I put it on game mode. I can change the hz levels of the sounds so i can raise the level for foot steps so i hear them over everything else
-Easy to adjust volume with the front panel

Cons: -None so far

Other Thoughts: The front piece is a addition that i really don't use much. It just is there but it does make it more friendly to use if you want to. I bought it for FPS, BUT NOTE all FPS are different. For example you wont hear foot steps in MW3 the same as you did in BlkOPs since in MW3 you cant turn off the back ground noise. ALSO GET IT ON SHELL SHOCKER!! I got 100 off just because i got it then. Last Note a Awesome sound Card isn't as good as its suppose to be for FPS if you don't have an Awesome headset. If you dish out money for this then also go with a top of the line headset!

Pros: It really does make a noticeable difference in audio quality. I have an Asus P8P68 deluxe MoBo with the Realtek HD audio chip, which gives fairly decent sound and audio effects. While I'm not wealthy enough to be an "audiophile", I'm still picky enough to be able to tell that there's much more depth to the audio with the X-Fi, whether in music or games. This is my second X-fi purchase, since my old one was PCI and won't fit in the new MoBo. I was looking for it to drop in price, but was lucky enough to catch a Shell Shocker for (9d9 dollars) which made it almost a no brainer. The Crystalizer and CMSS-3d bring plenty of power to the party - more than enough to justify the price paid. Now we go to...

Cons: The Drivers. Like i said, this is my second X-fi. The The Driver CD that I got with this one has virtually if not the exact same drivers that I was using in 2008. That is 4 year old drivers, shipping with a brand new card. Creative has newer drivers on their website, so not shipping them with the product is nearly inexcuseable.

Other Thoughts: The Ugly? - physically installing it was a snap, but downloading and installing the newset drivers brings us to our first bit of ugly. Vista64 has been out for just a few years now, but for some reason Creative's website Auto Downloader will not work with it. Trying it through the installed Auto Update lead to a hard-lock of my computer, something which I (almost) never get. After all of this, going through and manually downloading everthing and un-installing and re-installing drivers, it still took me 3 days to futz around and find the right combination of settings to make it work right. I'm not a genius, but I've been working on and diagnosing computer issues since the early 1990's for "friends and family". this was stupid complicated for a mature product. But, even after all the whining (if you've read this far) It still gets four stars ****. It sounds THAT good.

Pros: Great Sound! Even on my headphones everything is crystal clear. Installation was easy and quick.

Cons: YOU HAVE TO READ THE WEBSITE'S DIRECTIONS. AND YOU HAVE TO LEARN TO USE THE INCLUDED SOFTWARE!

This is not the card for you if you want plug play no hassle audio. Yes, 2 or 3 of the included software packs are not 'needed', but the creative control panel is ESSENTIAL. You have to use this program to switch audio channels. If you switch to home theater, you must go in the control panel, select encoder, and select your preferred settings or you will literally hear no sound. There's another link easy to find in their control panel for headphones / pc speakers. Just click on which you'd like to use and it does the work for you.

You CAN NOT get this card to work simply using windows sound / device manager, you have to use the software.

Other Thoughts: I don't mind using their control panel. The sound quality is amazing, it is an awesome looking product.

I'm using Win 7 64 bit...

Pros: Came in a nice box

Cons: hissssing popping static from moving mouse typing or just doing nothing seems a lot of people have had this problem i will be staying away from all creative products from now on i did notice disconnecting the front panel from the sound card stops some of the static but instead u get a high pitch whine coming out of your speakers i tried emailing creative about my problem they were no help at all checked my wires even tried it out on my friends computer same thing tried ALL of there drivers

Pros: None

Cons: Static and popping just form moving my mouse or touching my keyboard tried all different versions of drivers with no such luck to fixing my problem very very disappointing