[chengbin]

I have a Creative Xtrememusic as my sound card. I was bored today so I compared it to my onboard sound card to see if it was $100 well spent.

The conclusion? No. I heard very small improvements from using the Xtrememusic. I'm using a pair of RE0 to do the testing.

Do I have ear problems? Or does some onboard sound cards just sound that good?

 

[ROBSCIX]

Well, the Creative XM is not exactly the pinnacle of modern PC audio it is quite dated.
obviously the better playback gear you have the more your going to notice the differences also. The difference would also be more noticable in games as you have a gaming card there.

 

[chengbin]

I didn't test gaming. Maybe I'll do that the next time I'm bored.

What does the sound card do to make it sound good for games?

Should I use my Z-5500, or would earphones be good to do gaming comparisons?

 

[ROBSCIX]

That is a gaming sounncard so provided your playing games that take advantage of it you have hardware based effects. EAX 1,2,3,4,5 and OpenAL.
Game and support vary by OS of course bu that is the main point behind most of Creative cards.

What did you test with?
The higher quality of the testing material should make it easier to notice difference between sources.

 

[iriverdude]

X-Fi aren't great soundcards, and your Logitechs aren't that high quality either. Unlikely notice difference between onboard and the X-Fi. The trump card with X-Fi is EAX and directsound 3D, onboard will likely use more CPU cycles for EAX processing, and only support EAX 3 not 4/5. Your Logitech are 5.1 so I'd use them for gaming.

 

[ROBSCIX]

..don't forget hardware support for OpenAL.