Creative choice of the PCI interface for the X-Fi caused more than its fair share of discussions. Oddly enough Creative replied with several reasons for choosing the PCI and not the PCIe interface. One of the most commonly spread being the higher latency of PCIe, but when Playreaction.com had a chat with Senior Brand Manager for Audio, Darragh O’Toole, we find out that the reason was not really the entire truth. Creative designed the X-Fi to work through the PCI interface much because the motherboard manufacturers chose to keep the PCI interface alive, while PCIe was mainly being introduced to keep up with the ever faster graphics cards.
He implies though that there were audio transfer issues and that a PCIe version of the X-Fi needed more work before it could be launched. And next month we will hopefully see the fruit of their work as the PCIe version of X-Fi is expected to arrive in October.
The architecture of the X-Fi will remain the same, but will instead have four 4 audio jacks for outputting analog signals, instead of Creative 3 jack setup used today. When answering the question of the popular opamp mods that have appeared he simply replied that it is a matter of cost, but also that they want the high-end version of X-Fi to be among the best you can find. So there might be hope for some higher quality opamps with the PCIe version, we’ll just have to wait and see.
There is more, a lot more of interesting questions in the interview that you can find over at Playreaction.com
