Creative Labs PCIe Sound Cards

This is a Dell Studio XPS mini tower that has only 3 PCIe slots in addition to the one PCIe video card slot. I would like to replace the on board audio with a good sound card.

It seems that only Creative L. makes PCIe cards. I saw some ASUS cards, but they seem to be a bit more costly and physically too long.
I looked into the Studio XLS case, and see that one PCIe slot is so close to the video card that it is essentially unuseable. The other two are at least workable.

I "chatted" with Dell tech support and they state that the CL X-Fi Titanium Fatality Pro card would fit into the Studio XLS minitower.
The Fatal1ty Pro is the one with its own enclosure, and I was concerned that the enclosure would make the card too bulky to fit. I'm still not 100% convinced that it will fit, because there is a heat sink on the MB chipset that looks like it might get in the way.

Creative L also makes the X-Fi Titanium without the enclosure that is found on the FATAL1TY model. So far as I can tell, the cards are otherwise identical. The prices for them on ebay and amazon dot com are pretty close, and I am willing to spend the extra five or ten dollars if the FATAL1TY has something better in it-and not just the fancy looking enclosure around it.

Does anyone know if the Fatal1ty is in anyway better than the Titanium? There is something called X-ram on the Fatal1ty, but that is put to use by only a few games.

I do play games and I play music through the computer.

I'm torn between buying the X-Fi Titanium without the enclosure, and being more assured that it will fit, and/or buying the Titanium Fatal1ty and HOPING that it will fit, even though Dell tech support said it would, and also hope that the Fatal1ty is in some way "better" than the unenclosed one.

 

just to wet your appetite.

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/revie...ve_labs/soundblaster_x-fi_fatal1ty_fps/218114

 

Ignoring the PCIe part for a moment, I got to tell you,
Creative is having lots of problems with the X-Fi series. Not
the card itself (I think) but with their drivers. I've gone thru
3 cards now and still don't have the quality of sound that I
had with the old Audigy ZX version.

Check here first to see what other people are saying-
http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board?board.id=soundblaster

 

Thanks one and all for your inputs.
I ended up buying a X-Fi Fatal1ty Pro card on ebay.
It should arrive in a week, probably.

 

Well Savagcl, I should have listened to you. I am having trouble installing the
X-Fi Fatal1ty. I stuck it into a PCIe slot, started the downloaded driver package, and early on-got a popup that says "Setup is unable to detect a supported product in your system..." There is sound-and it is cleaner and clearer than the onboard sound. This is Vista Home Premium 64bit. Upon boot up, when the desktop appears, I saw about 6 items being installed- 2 HID devices, 2 USB somethings, and 2 references to high def audio, all being displayed in the lower right corner of the desktop. This happened before I tried the Creative driver execution, and before I could even stop that installation.
I did first disable the onboard audio.
In the hardware manager, under audio and video, there are two items listed: One is an ATI driver for high def audio, and the other is High Def Audio device. No mention of Creative Labs, Sound Blaster, nothing else.
I then moved the card to the adjacent PCIe slot.
Again, upon bootup, the same 6 items show as being automatically installed and displayed in the lower right corner of the desktop, same items under hardware manager, same popup while trying to execute the Creative Labs driver. Again, I have sound, but no application or features.
There is a 3rd PCIe slot, but it is partially blocked by the video card, and so, unuseable. I don't think anything different would result if I tried that anyway.
Did you ever get yours working?
I did some reading on various bulletin boards, and some of the attempted solutions look pretty onerous. About the only promising suggestion I saw was to unzip the driver package, and run setup.exe manually.
Help, anyone?

 

You might try the install or setup several times but it should
eventually find the card. I dont think i re-booted during the
multi-setup runs. Seems like a lot of people report that same
problem.

Lots of drivers out there and finding the right one is mostly
problematical. I dont have the fata1ilty (there is more than
1).

If it dont kick-in after a couple tries, try posting on their
forum (be patient tho, responses are very slow). Some
of my ? never got an answer.
My thoughts - they were not ready for vista 64 bit and
dummied up a set of drivers. They are still not ready
for vista 64 bit, my opinion, but are in a panic to get
caught up and making a mess of it.

Sorry i couldnt be more help. I'm still not getting sounds
like from my old audigy-zs model.

Let us know if you get it going .

savagcl

 

Just re-read you msg. Try downloading the driver and saving
it to your HD. then unzip it and run the setup (may still take
a couple attempts tho).

savagcl