PCI-Express Soundcard Question

NagaDrag · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 Dec 2006 Posts: 88

I've got a motherboard (a server board), for opterons, that only has 2 PCI-Express slots.
At the moment its running sound through a USB 'base', as the motherboard has no onboard sound.

Recently, I've done some digging and asking around, and I've found this card:

CREATIVE Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme AUDIO OEM PCI-Express Card Model: SB0820

Its basicly a 120$ PCI-Express sound card.

My question is, has anyone purchased it, is it supported, does it work well?

absoluteflatness · Posted: Fri Oct 05, 2007 12:44 pm Post subject:

I don't own an X-Fi, so take with a grain of salt.

As far as I know, there's no support from the ALSA people for the X-Fi, as it's an extreme departure from how the older creative cards work.

I believe Creative has released a beta closed-source driver available from their website, but it's x86_64 only. I'm not really sure of the level of quality from this driver, but I've learned to loathe closed-source out of tree drivers. Also, from what I see on Creative's driver website, it won't compile with gcc 4+. So, the outlook seems poor.

This link might take you there, but I'm not sure how links behave into Creative's download pages.