Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium HD review - A closer look

A Closer Look

Let’s have a closer look at the new Creative Labs flagship gaming card.

We will admit that is a nice looking soundcard and the protective shielding is a great idea preventing the end user from damaging any of the sensitive audio components from touch and keeps heat from radiating directly on the card from other cards.

It is also nice to see companies using more RCA jacks for I/O these are industry standard for consumer grade audio so it makes it easier to connect the card to high quality amplifiers or sources.

Here we can see the expansion header commonly seen on other Creative Labs cards.  However, according to cards designers this header is NOT compatible with existing drive bays.  There doesn’t seem to be much information on what the company intends to do with this header at this time.  Perhaps they will create an extension card to allow full 7.1 surround sound?

We will have to wait and see what they have in mind. Let’s have a look at the cards I/O and see what it offers the end user.

From left to right we have Microphone input (mini-jack), Headphones (mini-jack), Left and right line outputs (white/red) and line I/O - S/pdif I/O combo jacks.

Note: The last set of RCA jacks can function as normal line level input or can be switched to S/Pdif digital operation. White is optical input and Red is optical output.  This card does not offer coaxial S/Pdif output only optical connection.  The bundle does include two mini toslink to toslink cables which help for connections.  We also have to clarify that although this card has a headphone output, this design does not have a headphones amplifier.

The Titanium HD offer an industry standard front panel case header for connecting up headphone and microphone connectors found on most modern cases. We would like to note that there is also an unused connector on the card beside the above FP header which looks like it could have been used for power input but CL must have scrapped the idea.  Let’s have a look at some of the numbers on this design.