Creative Technology Shows Off Audio Card for PCI Express

[zachig]

Creative Finally Demos Sound Blaster for PCI Express x1

Creative Technology, a maker of digital media players and various multimedia devices, showcased its first audio card for modern PCI Express bus at the Consumer Electronics Show 2007. Specs of the product are unclear, but it is remarkable that Creative is finally paying attention to the bus that has been afloat for nearly three years now.
Images of Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio for PCI Express x1 bus, which have been published by several web-sites, reveal that the card carries one relatively small X-Fi chip, an unknown audio codec, the lack of onboard memory buffer, relatively small number of capacitors, the absence of MIDI port and the presence of S/P DIF connectors and five analog connectors to attack 7.1-channel audio system.
Read the FULL article HERE (http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multimedia/display/20070111140528.html).

[werty316]

Maybe this will start the market off with more PCI-E x1 and maybe PCI-E x4 cards.

[zachig]

Maybe this will start the market off with more PCI-E x1 and maybe PCI-E x4 cards.
Yeah, I think it's a great step of Creative to be the first ones, and hopefully we'll see more and more companies doing the same. :)

It reminds to me the progress that we see nowadays in the field of DVD-Writers, moving from the "old" IDE to SATA connections...:roll:

[peti1212]

Wow, this is the second product I saw with PCI-E 1x other than the network cards. Companies should start changing to PCI-E 1x and 4x than just using the old PCI slot.

[skootyloops]

Wow, this is the second product I saw with PCI-E 1x other than the network cards. Companies should start changing to PCI-E 1x and 4x than just using the old PCI slot.

They should, but they could cut out some of their market doing that since there are a lot of people who have motherboards which don't support things like pci-e.

[Kougar]

It is about bloody time they made at least one PCIe based card!! The interface technology is 3+ years old, and already in the newly released 2.0 revision which doubles available throughput bandwidth.

Unfortuantely the X-fi Xtreme Audio is one X-fi card to avoid purchasing, incase anyone has any ideas about getting this one which happens to be an Xtreme Audio.

The XtremeAudio card actually uses a cheaper Audigy DSP chip instead of the X-Fi chip, and handles some of the tasks in software instead of hardware processing. A better explantion of the various X-Fi card flavors can be found here: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2065002,00.asp (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2065002,00.asp)

[peti1212]

They should, but they could cut out some of their market doing that since there are a lot of people who have motherboards which don't support things like pci-e.

True, but they could have cards for both interfaces, and slowly change from one to the other.

[PP Mguire]

Considering that it dosent really make a difference which bus its on is the reason why they havent changed yet. Not to mention, most people like to use the bottom port of their mobo for sound cards, mine is on the top.

[icksol]

looks that soon pci slots will be a thing of the past heh