I was lucky enough to obtain a Creative Labs X-Fi Fatality FPS sound card at the 2005 Quakecon. Curious about it I wanted to know whether or not CPU utilisation is reduced or whether the marketing claim about 10,000+ MIPS was anything but hype. My testing procedure happened on a Shuttle SN95G5V3 with an AMD 4400+ 2GB (2x 1GB sticks) of memory running at 2-3-2-5 1T, a 74GB WD Raptor, a WD 320GB storage drive, X800XTPE and the two cards tested were a SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS, and the Creative X-Fi with 64 Mb of onboard ram.

The Inquirer