The Creative X-Fi Scandal
Back in the summer of 05’, Creative announced about a new revolutionary X-Fi audio processor that was supposed to change how our games sound. They said it would be a very powerful audio processor with a 51 million transistor chip. They also introduced many new features and claimed that it would be a breakthrough in multimedia audio. After Creative released their new X-Fi lineup many users complained about the following issues:
- Popping and crackling noises.
- Incompatibilities with nForce3/4 based motherboards.
- Blue screen of death.
- Hard lockups and strange behavior.
The media around the world already covered it and revealed all these issues many months ago. Creative even confirmed some of these issues. Today after many months, we did a little research to find out what has happened since then. We found out that only a few manufacturers have released BIOS updates to solve some of these issues. Creative has made a mysterious firmware upgrade that cannot be found on their website, and some users claimed it killed their card. According to users in their forums, most of the effected consumers are STILL having issues with the X-Fi series.
The last official software update from creative came in November 05’. Yes you heard it right, the last update came SIX MONTHS AGO and that’s after many websites and magazines critized Creative for these issues.
Today we tested a Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic on an ASUS A8N-SLI with the latest software/BIOS updates and we encountered crackling noise issues and somehow our Operating System locked up when we tried to reboot.
Why is Creative not doing much to solve these issues? Because they don’t have to! They have a lot of deals with game developers which keep optimizing their software for Creative products due to the lack of competitors. Creative became a monopoly because people wanted to use EAX and thought that using onboard audio took too much CPU time.
Creative users have been complaining for almost 6-7 months and they are not doing much to help them...
Source: NGOHQ
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