I recently got hold of an ancient Dell workstation tower. Unfortunately even with a new PSU it still seems unstable, however it has a sound card that sounds amazing. It seems to be a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum with the emu20k1, and rarely have I heard a computer product such good sounding music.
However because this PC is kind of squirrelly I’d like to move the sound card to my main rig. Problem is that it has no PCI slots. Now I don’t mean PCIe slots; I mean old skool PCI. Is there any way to drop this sound card into a new-ish mobo without the old style PCI slots?
Bad news, not aware of a way, at least not one commonly available or cheap
Good news: Soundblaster cards are cheap these days.
An Audigy (which IIRC was the successor to X-FI?) is only like $80 Australian which is likely cheaper than any add-in adapter card you’d find. It too will have similar sound quality to the old SB X-Fi i believe (i’ve had both X-Fi and Audigy in the past)
One thing to consider is that even if you get this thing physically into a modern PC, you may just not get it running due to probably no drivers being available.
I mean, when this thing came out… Vista was the new hotness (or not).
Well that’s at least one problem I’ve got whipped. This sucker is an odd one too, apparently a special model made for Dell w/ no drivers on the Creative site. But I did track down some Windows drivers for it.
However my intent was to use it with Linux, and boy does it sound good there. I may have gotten this old tower stable by tinkering with some of the power management settings.
Maybe my ears are fooling me, but this thing sounds a few notches better than the old Sound Blaster Z I used to have, and that was a nice card. The half-height adapter thing won’t work because this is a full-height card
I dunno, maybe I just need to buy something modern that sounds better than an SB Z. But I’m not made out of $$$.
Bridge chips were pretty common during the transition away from PCI, so yeah I’m not surprised some things never really switched over entirely. For audio specifically(and maybe other things as well), that sometimes caused problems for people on the production side since the buffer on the bridge chip can introduce some latency, but otherwise most people won’t ever know the difference.
You could add a riser cable in addition to your adapter, letting you mount it in a different location, but then your are even closer to where it just makes more sense to get a new sound card…
I get the impression that most folks are approaching sound cards as interchangeable. Granted, most low end ones are pretty generic and produce rubbish sound, but this one is really good. As in the best sound I’ve ever heard coming out of a computer.
I’ve only ever owned one pro audio card, an M-Audio Delta 410 based on the Envy24 chipset, and this old Sound Blaster has it beat. At least to my subjective, non-professional, audiophile wannabe ear. I’d really be willing to put the effort and some small outlay in to get it working in another machine. Now I’ve never owned another high end audio card, but I also don’t have $200 to blow on a sound card….
In normal-land, especially with reasonable (not absurdly cheap) modern audio hardware, the baseline consensus seems to be that you rapidly reach the point of diminishing returns — so your claim of this particular card sounding leaps and bounds better than anything else seems odd.
In audiophile-land, having a DAC/amp inside the PC case is frowned upon, and so — your claim of this particular card sounding leaps and bounds better than anything else seems odd
So maybe the concern is that this card while great for its time, it might be equivalent to most modern sound cards, and therefore the gut reaction is to advise you not to spend, and potentially waste, money on getting this particular card working in a potentially hotchpotch manner.
I like the idea of using a modern machine to talk to old hardware, but I have no idea how an EMU20K1 compares to modern DACs, either empirically, or perceptibly. So I would vote for stringing together a riser and a PCIe/PCI adapter, but purely because it is the more interesting solution, not because I know it is better quality/cost.
that sound blaster actually has really good DACS, the REAR channel DAC is actually better than the front channel one. there exists a modified driver that can swap front and rear ports. as well as windows 10 support.
Also, if you do not already have the MB you plan on using, a LOT of AM4 mainboards still have an old style regular PCI slot.
@Zedicus Thanks for confirming that I’m not hallucinating, or a victim of the placebo effect. I think this system is stable now, and I’m still pondering whether or not to drop this thing in a new motherboard. I did want to use this old Dell tower as a server (dual Xeon w/ 60GB of RAM) and also play with passthrough, including the sound card.
But having this card in a dedicated multimedia/gaming rig might be the way to go. And I do have a spare Ryzen 7 1700 knocking around.
That is the thing, most of the mid-priced soundcards use the same Realtek codec as mainboards, just with some filtering on the power rails and some Op-Amps to better drive headphones.
The advice to not throw analogue circuits inside a computer makes sense to me. Especially since you have the GPU with its very noisy DC-DC converter directly next door.
An Audiointerface card (AES, SPDIF, ADAT, etc.) that just handles digital on the other hand, is completely fine in there. As proven by thousands of studios doing exactly that: Analogue to Digital Conversion elsewhere, then pipe digital into computer for recording.
I get it but the old X-Fi are not really any better than an Audigy, and I’ve had both… I had most Sandblaster cards up to the Audigy 4 where I finally just didn’t bother any more.
I agree the Audigy/x-fi are way better than onboard audio. But my point is you can get a modern soundblaster with equivalent specs for cheap.
the best DACS were on the older cards, ending i think around the X-fi. the ZS and GOLD had some of the best.
Yes, placing the card inside a noisy PC is not ideal. but being in a PCI slot is orders of magnitude better than being on the Mainboard, and that is ignoring the crappy DACS on the MB. a trick we used to use was to make sure the PCI slot the sound card was in was non-shared. that is less of an issue now as almost nothing uses the PCI bus anymore.
here is an audigy in PCIE with a better DAC, though it is arguably ‘older’ tech. PCIE Audigy
it looks like the PCI version of the x-fi gamer has much better components than the PCIE version. apparently the PCIE version was built as an OEM card and then used as a retail version later.
by tinkering with some of the power management settings.
