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New X-Fi Platinum

ednrgednrg
in General Discussion and Chatter
After reading a few reviews, I bought the Soundblaster X-Fi platinum today. I was looking for a replacement for my existing Audigy 2 Platinum. One of the main reasons I got it today was that it was on sale at CompUSA and I had a gift card :D

But, after reading that it was much less taxing on the processor, I decided to try it.

Hardware Install:
The installation was just like any other card with a front bay. I removed the drivers for the old Audigy 2, and installed the new card and faceplate.

Drivers/Software:
I started the machine, and it recognized the card. I followed the instructions to click CANCEL when Windows wanted to find the drivers on it's own. Inserted the CD, and everything went smoothly ( a rarity for Windows). the Installation gave me 3 preference choices:
    Entertainment Mode Audio Creation Mode Gaming Mode[/list:u] The first thing I wanted to try was listening to some previous recordings through the new card to make sure everything was fine. Unfortunately, that wasn't really the case. All of my recordings were crackling (insert joke on how crackling really helps my recordings here :oops: ). I tried the sliders to make sure it wasn't caused by clipping, but that was not the case. After fiddling around with it for about a 1/2 hour, I decided to check their site for updated drivers. The description of the new drivers was music to my ears (pun intended). It read \"Removes randomly occurring audio distortion that may occur after you install drivers and restart your computer.\" I installed the new drivers, and everything functioned perfectly. I decided to push the new technology to see the latency. I set it to 1ms. To my surprise, it performed flawlessly. In fact, the ASIO control panel says that it's running at 0.9ms. That's a far cry from the Audigy. I then recorded some tracks to see how much it taxes the processor. To my amazement, the CPU usage was 1%. For all I know that 1% was caused by the program, and not the audio. I was also amazed at the diference in clarity from the Audigy 2 to the X-Fi. I can actually hear every note in the chord, and nothing is muddy (again, was not the case with the Audigy). I have just started playing with this thing, and can't give a full review yet. But, all in all, I am thrilled with it so far!!!! Maybe during the week, I'll really test out that zero processor power, and see how many tracks I can record before it starts to rise.
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