Creative X-Fi shown off on a notebook

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Product: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio Notebook
Website: Product details
Price: UK £60 INC VAT EU €79.90 INC VAT
System Requirements: Internet browser with HTTPS support

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UP TO NOW, "notebook PC with high-end sound" was a kind of oxymoron. The most you could expect, even on a top-grade system, was one of those software-driven multichannel codecs with so-called HD audio. Now, we got the first ExpressCard (mobile PCI-E) based true DSP & effects notebook audio card, the long-named Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio Notebook.

Pretty Box & Prettier Card
The classic Creative X-Fi style box, but this time in a cute small A5-sized edition, contains the card, a speaker dock extender, driver CD, PowerDVD Surround, manual, earphones and a protective pouch. The sleek silver ExpressCard will match the similar-colour notebooks, but not the equally common black ones

drive a full 5.1 or 7.1 speaker system from a single notebook card

The card has some pretty impressive specs for a mobile audio engine: the EMU20K X-Fi processor with 24-bit 96 kHz full surround recording and playback in hardware, even though, if using Vi$ta instead of Windoze XP, the SP-DIF output will be restricted from the usual 96 kHz to the more modest 48 kHz. Its CMSS can give you near-true surround experience on a good pair of headphones too, again all in hardware without taxing the poor notebook CPU.

I ran the card on an MSI P200 dual-core 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo "Santa Rose" notebook, under Windows Vista 32-bit OS (or hyper-virus, depends on the opinion). The Rightmark Audio Analyzer 6.0.5 as well as Rightmark 3D Sound CPU meter were used to check audio quality and CPU load - it couldn't be, however, compared to the integrated "HD" audio which simply didn't run either Audio Analyzer or 3D Sound anyway.

Better sound at less CPU load?
Audio quality-wise, there is no comparison anyway, as the X-Fi provides much higher sampling rate, crystalisation, effects and so on, which the on-board notebook audio can't offer at all - not to mention the dynamic range or frequency response. In the CPU usage benchmark, it maxed out at 0.82% peak and 0.358% average CPU use under DirectSound 2D - pretty good figure. Now, DS 3D and EAX portions didn't work under Vista, but that's a problem which has nothing to do with any hardware vendor, and everything to do with one huge software vendor not exactly know for best-quality apps, should I say?

I played the 384 kbps MP3's under Windows Media Player 11 (no visualisation) on Intel HD audio, and on Creative Media Source Player with X-Fi Mobile. Aside from noticeably clearer sound when using X-Fi and the Creative Aurvana headphones, the CPU utilisation never exceeded about 5%, even with all the effects like speeding up the playback, audio clean-up or CMSS enabled. In the on-board audio case, the CPU utilisation wavered between 6% and 9%, peaking at about 11% when playback speedup 2x was used.

When playing WMV HD Alexander the Great movie trailer in WMP 11, the difference was greater - with the X-Fi, the system usage peaked at about 17%, while on-board sound playback went up to 25% in Task Manager performance graphs, using both cores by the way.

The X-Fi will, therefore, give quite a bit of extra "experience" to the avid music listeners on the go, keen to, say, blast their mobile MP3 collection on the hotel's plasma TV speaker set with all the effects thrown in for in room parties, or a mobile gamers who insist on a matching sound to their high-end mobile 3-D graphics engine. I assume you won't exactly be watching HD-DVD or BD hi-def movies with 5.1 surround sound on a notebook, but if you - really - do, this card is a must for you,

In short
X-Fi Notebook matches the high-end desktop PC sounds to your mobile - just make sure you got a good reason to put it on the corporate laptop purchase bill. Did I say "we need better presentation sound?"

The Good
Sleek looking card giving as close to hi-fi sound as a notebook can get, without shelling a lot of dosh

The Bad
No 32-bit CardBus version for the older laptops, there are still plenty of those, why let them be stuck just with mobile Audigy 2 ZS, Creative?

The Ugly
Come to think of it, the saddest thing is that this grade of audio should have been on board every notebook that wants to call itself "multimedia" one - yet none has it as standard. µ

Bartender's Report