LGR - Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion Series

EAX and Doom 3: The difference between 7pm and 3am... Not as much attention is paid to sound these days. I remember my Sega CD blowing my little mind with Q-Sound, which foreshadowed much of what came later. Now, I'm running a Xonar D2X in my main machine. Dedicated sound hardware still has a place, and you can sure enough hear it. Funny thing is, I'm still using my original Klipsch Promedia speakers.

Paul

Fatal1ty and X3 were huuuge back then

EntryLevelGPU_4060

eSports legends and the whole story of how they came about in general is a tale to tell for sure

LGR

I can't get enough of these hardware videos; I can't describe it but there's something so satisfying about them. Halfway through I thought you were going to launch into a min-documentary on Fatal1ty and was slightly sad you didn't, although I'm sure it would have required a lot of effort. Maybe a future tech tales?

I was using the onboard audio by 2007, the first card I ever owned was a SoundBlaster 16, ISA card. :D

Robert Butler

I really like these upgrade videos, especially with hardware that was top of the line when I was in my teenage years! I'm sure you've got an excellent reason not do to it again, but the "Ignorant Game Reviews" you did back in -11 and -12, was wonderful with your snarky and sarcastic humour, will you ever do another one? :)

Mark Tbom

Haha, nice. Drinking and (virtually) driving with such potential for destruction is so much fun

LGR

Heck it might even make it run better!

LGR

In 2007 i used onboard on my modern machine, good enough for gaming and watching a movie.

BastetFurry

Am I the only one who wants Doom 3 EAX sound combined with the "Potato Man" mod?

Steve Lovelace

How is it possible to restore lost sound? It's like trying to restore lost pixels in jpg compression or uprezzing. The best that can be done is blurring or interpolation and I imagine it's much the same with lost sound dynamic range. Can you do a video on how that works?

The X-Fi is so much more appropriate for this build. It's too bad they had a habit of outright dying, I absolutely loved my X-Fi back in the day.

Leigh Beattie

I still use an X-Fi for my general card and have both the internal and external bay. The external bay has all of what the internal bay does but you get full sized midi in/out/thru and all remote control items are replicated on the external unit in matching knobs. Also the AD-Link cable is very hard to find and so i had to make one. That was not fun. Im not sure if you could use both internal and external at the same time though, never thought to try. But using the external bay and hooked to my Yamaha SY-85 was awesome, especially for recording as all the cabling was neat.

Naoki Saito

Ahhh, reminds me of when I used an X-Fi Gamer outputting to a HiFi stereo setup for bookshelf speakers. Audio sounded amazing at the time but the card started to die after about 5 years. Moved shortly after that and I started using headphone so just stuck with the onboard audio. Recently purchased some BeyerDynamic headphone and an SB AE5-X so here's to hoping I get back some of that lost sound quality.

Yep, Google something like "eax software emulation" and you'll find a bunch of options!

LGR

wait you can get EAX on modern systems trough software?

Ezydenias

Somehow EAX died before I got to experience it. And I never bothered to buy a good soundcard later, because I used a soundblaster that when I switched to onboard sound in 2009 or so that was so much weaker than the onboard chip that the EAX it produced was not really worth it. And I never had EAX games before 2009 so.^^

Ezydenias

I have a soundblaster z in my current pc because the stupid realtek card didn't want to cooperate. It would not detect that I plugged in the headphones, then I had too struggle to find the force detection thing. After some os reinstalls I was fed up. Flatout 2 is awesome! My brother and I used to drink and drive with g25 or g27 steering wheel, and we drove like crazy. No game has been able to replace it.

Uncleawesome

The motherboard in my current PC is branded "Fatal1ty" (it's an ASRock) and seems to have the same logo as what's on your sound card. I had no idea "Fatal1ty" was a person (I've never heard of him), I just bought this board because I got a good deal on it.

Eric Siegel

Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Super Tubo Ultra Hyper Championship Edition!

Eric Siegel

And maybe a CS review on top... I'm sure Clint is Global Elite and totally hardcore at CSGO :)

Grunk

I don't recall there ever being a LGR Half Life 1/2 review. Maybe it's time?

Grunk

Was this made before or after Creative bought out E-MU and started putting the E-MU 10K sound chips on all their cards? A year or two after this I had an E-MU 0404 USB, and they were a Creative subsidiary by the time.

JennaKay

I had a SoundBlaster Audigy 2 in my system up until 2013 when I upgraded to my current system which uses an Asrock Z77 pro 4-m mobo. It has no pci slots so I put the card in an older system and it died on me. :(

Bryndal Dwyre

I had a X-Fi XtremeGamer back in 2006, and kept it until 2012. The card was a definite upgrade from my old SB Live Value, but I was always a bit annoyed that the card forced audio to be resampled if it wasn't put in Audio Creation Mode. Music and other sounds were a little... "hollow" sounding when running in Gaming Mode once I started using larger stereo speakers instead of the tiny speakers that were part of a 4.1 setup I had. Once games started doing positional audio in software (Half-Life 2 did it for sure), the X-Fi didn't really serve much purpose anymore and I swapped it out for a Asus Xonar DSX since it has higher quality audio outputs than the XtremeGamer, and to this day the X-Fi sits gathering dust in my Box O' Stuff.

Bryan McIntosh

wow that reverb

Evan B

I used to have this, and I want one again. Clint, this is your fault

That is one sexy card. I always dreamed about these back in the day. I am kinda jealous now.

Alyxx the Rat

It wouldn’t matter if it sounded exactly the same as stock, you gotta have all those knobs and inputs man

Zachary Outen

i use to have an Alienware laptop with a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS notebook sound card. I can't remember the model of laptop, but it was slick with 2 cd drives(one slot loading, one tray). I played so much DooM 3, Star Wars KotOR 1 and 2, F.E.A.R. 1 and 2

I'm still using it in my windows 10 pc (it's a x-fi elite, but almost the same), i love how it sounds. I always used the floppy power connector to power it, you didn't use it if i saw correctly. i guess it's optional. (10 years later i realize that)

Wow!! I had no idea Doom 3 could sound soo good!! I'm floored....

Carey Brown

It was really neat hearing the comparison with and without EAX on. Those voices really do sound so much better! Growing up with a Macintosh IIcx (and later a PowerMac 7500) I took sound for granted and never understood why PC users preferred sound cards when audio was already on the motherboard. I just didn’t get what all the fuss was about. But thanks to your in-depth videos about PC sound cards over the years I’ve learned why people were so passionate about these things! (And rightly so)

Mac84

Fatal-one-ty

kalleboo

Nice timing. Just put my old X-fi Fatal1ty back into my PC an hour ago (had to get it back then after the Audigy 2 got dropped)