Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme music Card

[BobbyDRZA]

I'm planning on buying a Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card to replace my Audigy LS. I'm doing this because certain games such as Halo, Half-Life 2, NFSMW, and a few others often have draggy sound during play and crash or stutter. I know that it is the card because other peeps on the Creative.com forum have experienced the same problem. The card is said to have no on-chip acceeration for games so it uses to CPU. I do have games that work with the card such as the Sims 2, Painkillers, Hitman Contract, Empire Earth 2, Doom 3, and other but some games just don't work right with this card. I am thinking of getting the X-Fi Xtreme Music card soon and want to know the answers to the following question:

1.Is the card good for gaming?

2.Since the requirenments are set higher for this card, will it hurt performance?

3.since the card is said to have the best gaming performance, will it help on my system?

My system specs:
XP Pro serv pack 1
AMD Athlon XP 2600 Barton Core
MSI Delta Mobo NForce2
Mushkin 1GB Ram 333 Bus
ATI Radeon 9600XT 128MB
Sound Blaster Audigy LS
Thermaltake 480 Watt Power Supply

Any help is greatly appreciated

 

[alvino]

Usually audio processors like the X-Fi help take off some of the load of the CPU when it has to encode sound and so forth, but if your system doesn't meet the minimum requirements, then it might slowdown the sound card instead. Don't get me wrong though...the Sound Blaster X-Fi is the best sound card in the market, so just make sure your computer meets the minimum requirements before buying it.

 

[jac006]

yeah, the x-fi is so powerful it will get rid of all sound processing... therefore speeding up games.

 

[BobbyDRZA]

If you look at my specs above I have the following:

My system specs:
XP Pro serv pack 1
AMD Athlon XP 2600 Barton Core
MSI Delta Mobo NForce2
Mushkin 1GB Ram 333 Bus
ATI Radeon 9600XT 128MB
Sound Blaster Audigy LS
Thermaltake 480 Watt Power Supply

Should I be good to go?

 

[TRDCorolla1]

Yes, it's pretty good. X-Fi is possibly the best audio chipset to date.

System Requirements:

Intel Pentium III 1 GHz, AMD 1 GHz processor or faster
Intel, AMD or 100% compatible motherboard chipset
Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2)
256MB RAM
600MB of free hard disk space
Available PCI 2.1 slot for the audio card
CD-ROM/CD-RW or CD/DVD-ROM required for software installation