Creative X-Fi: A New World of Sound

Test System And Audio Measurements

Our test configuration remains the same, and is plenty powerful enough for an X-Fi card. Note, however, that you have to make sure your PC's power supply is sufficient: if it's a little weak or of poor quality, it can cause problems operating cards equipped with racks, which draw extra power. We ran into this problem during a test on a consumer-level machine that already had various equipment added; the power supply wouldn't allow a normal boot-up.

All of our measurements were made on the X-Fi Elite Pro model. As mentioned previously, the differences in performance between this model and the others have to do with the quality of the Analog/Digital and Digital/Analog converters. The table below shows the typical performance levels of the different models of X-Fi cards. You'll note that the major difference was with record/playback, where we jumped from a signal-to-noise ratio of 112 dB for the Elite Pro to 98 dB for the other cards. With playback, the difference was less significant, since only one converter (D/A) is involved. As we said earlier, the input on the PCI card is the one that offered the best performance, so that's the one we used.