Introduction

Needing little introduction, Creative Labs has been around for a long time in the PC audio industry, since basically the dawn of it all in fact. They offered first up the Sound Blaster 1.0 (CT1310/CT1320A) if memory serves, and then followed onward with a massive line of rock solid Windows based PCI, and later, PCI Express sound cards.

When these cards were combined with Creative Labs' in house technology known as EAX (or Environmental Audio), they took the gaming community by storm and fast became a gamers first choice for surround sound. This is after the latest graphics accelerator was installed, of course.

To this day the success of EAX is yet to flounder thanks very much to the strong backing of the physical hardware itself, namely the X-Fi chipset which we first took a look at a couple of years ago. At that time we were already very impressed by how it sounded, and also with the interface it offered users.

Back to the present day now and the new Titanium HD sure has a serious name as well as a serious spec sheet to match. But will this board be a better option than the hugely successful ASUS Xonar heavy hitters out there? - That remains to be seen. But with arguably a more developed and equipped chipset under the hood, things are off to a good start!