Home > Consumer Reviews > Sound Blaster X-Fi Surround 5.1

having owned this product for about 2 months, i can honestly say its quite amazing.. for those who (just like me) decide to use this for laptops and surround speakers , it's the best product out there (imo)
Although there have been sum reviewers who for whateve reason said it slows ur computer down (cos it connects vis USB) ive barely noticed.

to be more specific:
Sound: extraordinary, crystal clear - especially in combination with a good set of speakers (e.g.Creative)
offers full 5.1 surround support, has 7 outlets for various speakers and devices: 4 for speakers ( L, R, Rear, C/Sub) and 3 additional (very useful ones) - headphones, mic , line-in

includes a convinient volume and remote control.

The only slight fault this device potentially causes is that from time to time , the sound goes dead for about 3 seconds ( especially when you mess with settings in Windows - might be drivers problems , dont know)

But in spite of this, it's a decent product that no other sound blaster can beat (especially in this price range and considering this card is external, its a no.1 choice for laptop users

If the sound card worked well it would be a very good sound card. The effects sound good, you get a remote and it's easy to set up. Unfortunately there are occasional crackling sounds that last a few seconds. This will happen every ten minutes or so. I personally find it very annoying. Creative know about this but they've placed the blame on nvidia motherboards which i don't actually have. This seems to be a recurring problem with all creative sound cards. They probably work fine on some computer but there are many that they won't work well on. Creative should be sorting this out but they're not so i'm gonna have to get another sound card which will be a bit of a task considering i'm on vista.

That is really very good quality equipment for reasonable price!!!
I have a HP Pavilion laptop with Windows XP and I desperately wanted to improve the quality of sound I get from it so I decided to buy this card together with Logitech G51 Speakers.
I bought speakers and sound card at one go on Amazon (both delivered after 3 days from purchase - excellent!) and it was excellent choice! Thanks to this set now I can enjoy a really good quality Dolby Surround sound system. Installation process was very easy and after 10mins my card was working without any problems.

I truly recommend Soundblaster X-Fi Surround 5.1 as an excellent sound card for laptops with Windows XP. I do not know what about Vista...

Regards
Lukasz

Right im using this on my Sony Vaio VGN-FZ21M laptop.
This laptop had 2 ports on the soundcard one being microphone and one being headphones. So i bought this external soundcard. My Dolby 5.1 surround sound speaker system has 3 x 3.5mm jacks subwoofer, front and rear. This external soundcard yeh it has ports for them but im not sure if this is hardware of software related but the subwoofer sounds absolutley rubbish for music games and movies using this thing...
Its only now that ive swapped rear speakers and subwoofer ports it sounds relativly good. But then thats surround sound screwed up.

If you use the subwoofer in all the correct labelled ports all your sub would do is grumble or will stay totally silent. Theres only so much of fidderling with the EQ and volume and frequencies with the software. Its taken me about 2 hours to try and set this up and it still sounds awful. I may as well just buy a damn amplifier and plug that up.

Well after finding out i cant use my 360 through it either im just going to send it back if i can. Its not worth £40.01 it should be free. Probably the worst thing ive ever purchased thats made by creative.

I bought this with the intention of plugging it into my Acer Aspire Revo nettop allowing me to listen to dolby digital surround through my surround sound amp. I was beset with problems from the start. Firstly the driver from the creative site is still only in beta. To follow that the creative software refused to acknowledge the device was plugged in and when I finally got it working it didn't output in 5.1 surround despite me trying everything - I only got a working test through Windows' own speaker check - the creative software didn't work.

To top it all, I tried watching online video and the sound crackled when I used the optical output and when it wasn't doing that, it slowed right down making the motion jerky. From what I can see, this device is basically a software suite and the box is just a glorified volume control with a few ports on it - the computer's processor is doing most of the work, which is not good when you're using an Intel Atom processor, struggling with full screen flash video.

Basically, avoid this if you're running an Atom processor or Windows 7.