Hardware Reviews

I love my X-Plosion so far.

The only quibbles I have are things that can be resolved in driver updates, so I'm not too worried. (Things like occassional skipping in Winamp when I'm busy typing away quickly in another window or a perceived slight audio delay in PowerDVD.)

Functionally it's solid. No crashes or errors, no blatant bugs or problems. Great sound quality through digiital and the analog OpAmps can be upgraded if you want higher quality analog sound output (but it's already good enough for most users).

If you're a hardcore gamer you certainly could run an X-Fi on another PCI slot. At least one X-Plosion owner is doing that because he wants the higher EAX levels that Creative keeps for themselves, the 0-5 framers-per-second improvement in gaming it gets, plus the X-Fi's analog output is slightly higher quality than the OpAmps on the X-Plosion. (Of course the X-Fi lacks digital outputs unless you get the very expensive one with the front bay panel.)

If you're Toslink or S/PDIF and watching movies and listening to music and some gaming, get an X-Plosion.
If you're analog inputs, mostly gaming, and don't need onboard hardware DDL/DTS encoding, get an X-Fi.
If you want the best of both worlds, get both! :)

I'm sticking with the X-Plosion for now since I have Logitech Z-680s connected with Toslink and the games I play all run better performance-wise than they did when I was using the onboard ALC-800-series sound on my A8N-SLI Premium so I certainly have no loss of gaming performance but actually an increase. Plus everything sounds incredibly awesome in games, movies, and music. :)