Hey everyone. I'm trying to shop for a sound card, but I'm not sure of what I need. Right now I have this question, which is most important to me: What will be the impact of getting a relatively nice, gamer-oriented sound card on my computer's performance? Do all those features like the "X-Fi 24-bit Crystalizer" and EAX put extra strain on the processor/memory? You see, I have a fairly old system, built about 6 years ago, with WinXP. My current sound card is really old: SB PCI 512 (it's from like 1998 or something lol). The rest of my specs are newer but also quite old. You can see them in my sig. I'm considering getting an X-FI XtremeGamer 7.1 sound card. Will it fit into my system smoothly? I'm concerned it might actually make my computer more sluggish in games... (I'm not an expert on how sound card technology works.) ** P.S. I play Battlefield 1942, which is where the 3-d sound stuff would help. Other than that, I pretty much only use my comp to listen to music. So, my sound requirements are not extreme at all.
By adding a good sound card to your system you will end up boosting the performance of your system and getting more fps out of a game. i recommend you get a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer or depends on your budget you could go for a better quality.
Thanks, I've been hearing that answer from others as well. I decided ultimately to stay away from that card because reviewers kept saying how Creative installs lots of bloatware, and also one person said it doesn't work with Linux, and I want to try Linux eventually. Bloatware is kind of my pet-pieve, I get annoyed when those driver disks install a bunch of stuff that take up tons of space and you don't know what the point of it all is. Just annoys the hell out of me lol. I ended up ordering this one Product from Amazon.
