PCI-E vs PCI X-Fi titanium?

C

conscript

2[H]4U
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Mar 19, 2001
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Just wondering if there was any reason other than what slots i wanted to use on my motherboard btween getting a PCI-E or PCI legacy soundcard, specifically the x-fi TI. I'm having no luck finding this question thru search, but i know it's had to have come up before.
 
They are just different slots depending what you can fit with your setup. Often times with SLI or Crossfire, all the PCI slots will be blocked, except for a PCI-e 1x slot. If you want an internal sound card, it's a good option to have.
 
ok that's what i thought, just making sure there wasn't some addition bandwidth advantage or something. Currently have a sealed x-fi gamer from bestbuy that's PCI, but was thnking of just returning and gettign an X-fi Ti PCI-E from newegg. cost is neglible, and while the slot doesn't matter to me right now, if i ever for ALI or CFX it wouldl be a problem. Ofcourse, by the time i ever go CFX, there will probably be a better soundcard available anyway...hmm, think I'll just install the card i have now... thanks / C
 
A major difference between PCI and PCI-E, aside from bandwidth, is interrupt handling. Creative has had issues in the past with their cards flooding the PCI bus with interrupt requests which at the worst case cause system instability. With the PCI-E bus there's much less potential for that since the sound card's interrupt requests travel down lanes dedicated to the card. Potential still exists for system instability however it's greatly reduced because of the dedicated communication lanes.
 
The Titanium uses the EMU20K2 which is a newer native PCI-E chip and fixes some bugs associated with the EMU20K1. For most purposes though they should be functionally identical.
 
I have 2 slots PCI-E x1.
One supports 2.5Gb and the other one 5Gb. In which slot should I place the card ?
 
USMC2Hard4U said:
I would put it in the higher bandwidth slot.

Not that it matters because a sound card will not come close to saturating any PCIe link.
Click to expand...

Agreed. Even the PCI version of the X-fi's does amazing things with 128 channels at once so, I can't imagine that the PCI-E version will be in any way constrained by a lower bandwidth PCI-E slot.
 
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