Review: Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty soundcard

Although the latest gaming PCs are fitted with faster PCI Express card slots, most soundcards are still designed to be plugged into older, slower PCI slots.

This is where the Soundblaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty comes in. It’s a x1 PCI Express card (it also works in x4 and x16 slots), so it can take advantage of the faster transfer speed.

Due to its metal shielding jacket, the card looks quite different from others on the market. This helps shield the circuitry from interference caused by noisy components inside your PC. Despite the addition of the shielding jacket, the card is still very easy to fit in a PC.

The card is designed for 7.1 surround sound, so has four mini-jack line outputs, the first of which doubles as the headphone jack. You also get a stereo microphone socket and optical digital audio inputs and outputs.

The usual Soundblaster software pack is provided, including Creative’s Mediasource for managing media and PowerDVD for playing movies – the latter must be downloaded. You also have to register the card if you want to use the Dolby Live mode.

As with all X-Fi models, the Titanium Fatal1ty’s software control panel allows you to switch between three modes: content creation, entertainment and games.

The content creation mode activates the card’s ASIO (audio stream input/output) drivers and tweaks the card’s settings for low-latency performance in audio software, such as Cubase and Reason.

The entertainment mode is designed for listening to music and Dolby Digital EX and DTS surround-sound support in movies. In this mode, you can also use the card’s Crystalizer effect, which does a good job of adding oomph to compressed music tracks, and the CMSS 3D effect, which introduces a bit of extra width and depth to music and soundtracks.

The main attraction of the Titanium Fatal1ty, though, is the gaming mode. Creative’s cards have a reputation for excellent gaming surround-sound support and this one is no different. It has support for full Eax 5.0 HD and OpenAL, plus there’s 64MB of fast X-Ram to help speed up game performance.

But the Titanium Fatal1ty also has another trick up its sleeve. As well as outputting surround sound over the analogue outputs, it can encode gaming surround sound into Dolby Digital Live so that you can output it via the optical digital output. This means you can connect the card to a surround-sound receiver via a signal optical cable, rather than hooking up lots of analogue cables.

In terms of performance, the card is very impressive. Games such as Bioshock and Mass Effect sound top class, with the card delivering precise surround-sound positioning and crystal clear audio quality. Add to that the excellent sound quality across all the different modes produced by its pristine 24-bit, 96KHz audio playback on all outputs, and you’ve got a seriously good soundcard.

However, there is a downside to the Titanium Fatal1ty – its price. As with many of Creative’s cards, you’re paying a significant price premium for the Soundblaster badge.

Whereas a similar offering, such as the Asus Xonar DX PCI-E, costs just £70, the Titanium Fatal1ty clocks in at nearly double that. To be fair, the Xonar has to emulate Eax 5.0 in software and doesn’t produce quite as precise surround-sound results, but it’s still a significant price difference.

Nevertheless, if you’re serious about surround sound in games and don’t mind paying the price premium, then you’ll find the Titanium Fatal1ty provides stunning performance for music, movies and especially gaming.