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New X-Fi Audio Cards are Here

Only it doesn't say Creative on the PCB

Jun 4, 2007 13:11 GMT  ·  By
X-Fi Prelude Audio Card
   X-Fi Prelude Audio Card

As strange as it may seem, Creative has started to license their own chips in order to spread them worldwide with the help of some large PCB integrators. However up until now no such demands were made by any producers so one could think that this idea was useless.

Fortunately for Creative, there actually is a company that has started to roll out a product based on the original X-Fi design. Have you ever heard of Auzentech? Well, me neither but that's of no importance since the San Jose-based company has announced the first X-Fi-based sound card.

Dubbed "X-Fi Prelude", this sound card is indeed based on the X-Fi chipset but if you take a look at the PCB itself you will notice that it has little in common with the original X-Fi design (except for the memory traces). The card seems to be somewhat bigger than the original X-Fi and has a lot more capacitors than the original design.

However that's not all. Auzentech also states that this particular card has updated sound DACs, ADCs and codecs which are said to replace the existing ones found on the X-Fi card in order to offer an even better sound output. However one can only speculate on this idea since the company has not released any info regarding the specifications of the DACs and ADCs.

Unfortunately, just as all X-Fi cards, this one too has a classical PCI connector so it will use the older PCI bus instead of the newer PCI-Express connector. And that's a pity since a lot of users are still waiting for a PCI-E X-Fi card.

Some of you may remember that Creative actually presented an X-Fi variation based on the PCI-E x1 connector some 6 months ago but since then nothing happened. Unfortunately Auzentech's card is currently under heavy development so no one can actually tell if an x1 PCI-E version will be rolled out after all.

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