Verdict: A PCI Express X-Fi with a Dolby Digital encoder.
Creative's X-Fi Titanium is promoted as the official card of the Championship Gaming Series, with the power to make you as l33t as Johnathan 'Fatal1ty' Wendel, whose face adorns the box. More interesting is the fact that this is the first PCI Express X-Fi to be worthy of the name, and the first X-Fi to have a Dolby Digital Live! encoder for true positional surround sound in games.
Creative has taken a while to release a fully fledged PCI-E sound card (the PCI-E Xtreme Audio performs many of its X-Fi effects using software, as it has only basic hardware), and blames odd latencies in the PCI-E bus for this delay. However, it has obviously now fixed these issues to its satisfaction. Despite the higher bandwidth of PCI-E's serial point-to-point connection compared with PCI's shared parallel bus, there are minimal practical differences between this card and PCI cards with the same chipset, such as Creative's X-Fi Xtreme Gamer Fatal1ty Professional. Creative claims that both cards can achieve an ASIO latency of 2ms and that there's no noticeable difference in their performance, which our tests confirmed.
The X-Fi Titanium is sheathed in a black metal shield to block electromagnetic interference from other components in your system. Beneath this, the card looks much like its PCI predecessors. At its heart is Creative's X-Fi CA20K2 processor, supported by 64MB of X-RAM memory, an 8-channel Cirrus Logic CS4382 digital-to-analogue converter (DAC), and a 4-channel Wolfson WM8775SEDS analogue-to-digital converter (ADC). The CS4382 certainly produces high-quality audio, but can't quite match the DACs used in Auzentech's Auzen X-Fi Prelude, which has a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of 120dB compared to the Titanium's 109dB output SNR.
As well as dedicated optical S/PDIF in and out ports, the X-Fi Titanium has the usual four 3.5mm analogue outputs. Whether you favour digital or analogue audio, the card supports 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound, although you'll have to supply your own optical cable for digital.
Many of the most widely advertised features of Creative's sound cards are purely software-based. This includes the much-vaunted Dolby Digital Live!, which encodes the audio from any program into a Dolby Digital bit-stream to be sent via optical S/PDIF to a surround-sound speaker system with a decoder. While other X-Fi cards support up to 7.1 speaker setups, the audio these cards produce is merely upmixed and not truly separated, and therefore isn't really clean, positional surround sound. However, remember that you'll need a 5.1 or 7.1 speaker setup, a Dolby Digital Live! decoder and an optical cable to use Dolby Digital Live!.
The X-Fi Crystalizer is still on hand to interpolate low bit-rate audio, filling the gaps left by the compression process and creating a fuller sound. The effect is reasonably convincing, but it's no substitute for encoding your audio losslessly in the first place. We were suitably impressed by the virtual surround sound environments produced by CMSS-3D, which upmixes stereo sound to virtual 5.1 or 7.1. It was particularly effective through headphones, even if true audio channel separation is still preferable.
The driver also supports ASIO (Audio Stream Input/Output), which allows compatible audio applications to connect directly to the sound card, bypassing Windows' audio mixing layer to reduce latency. This is useful for audio production, but the X-Fi Titanium wouldn't be our first choice for this purpose, as it has only one combined microphone/line input for analogue audio. Perhaps the most useful piece of software is Creative's ALchemy, which restores the 3D audio and EAX effects that aren't supported in Vista.
Whether you're using XP or Vista with ALchemy, the card's EAX 5.0 hardware processing for games continues to make Creative's gaming sound cards the most appealing. The various effects, such as changes in the sound of footfalls on different surfaces and the reverberation of gunfire in different environments, help to create a sense of total immersion, and such effects are rivalled only by other X-Fi cards. Asus' Xonar DX is less accomplished with its emulated EAX 5.0 support, for example.
Conclusion
This is the first Creative PCI-E sound card that's worth buying, and it does everything it should. It's a solid all-round card that's well suited to music, movies and games. If you're after a PCI-E sound card for gaming, it's a better option than the similarly priced Asus Xonar DX, simply because Creative's hardware EAX 5.0 support is more convincing than Asus' emulation. Dolby Digital Live! is a welcome addition, but Creative plans to make the DDL encoder available to owners of older X-Fi cards for $4.72 (£2.58).
Ultimately, aside from PCI-E, the X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro adds little that's new to the successful X-Fi formula. If you already have a good gaming X-Fi, this card won't add much except dedicated optical S/PDIF and free Dolby Digital Live!. If your PCI-E slots are in a better position than your PCI slots for a sound card (away from a hot graphics card, for example), you may want to upgrade. If you don't have a decent sound card, the Titanium is a better long-term buy than a PCI X-Fi Xtreme Gamer, even at almost twice the price, as PCI-E 1x slots will replace PCI slots in time.
