I’ve been holding back on soundcard purchase since I ditched my Soundblaster Live Value for Nvidia SoundStorm. After another upgrade I remained on onboard AC’97 cause I’ve switched to 5.1 speaker system and SB Live only supports 4.1 sound. After everthing is settled in, I guess it’s time for a new soundcard, and the timing is just right, X-Fi is out in the market long enough for the price to be stabled down :), not to mention my sound has very audible lag whenever I run and cast healing spells in Oblivion :P. Read up the review from HardCoreWare.Net just now about Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty, comes with 64MB X-RAM (read review for details on that) and a IO console + IR Remote, which is RM899 locally by the way. That’s abit steep for me, I’m actually looking at Xtreme Music, plain edition which is RM465 or Platinum that comes with console and remote at RM650. No X-RAM for both but I think I can live with that, because there’s only 2 games supporting that, and as they said in the review :

Only time will tell if other developers will hop on board, spending the extra resources on features that will only be useful to those who spent more than USD250 on their soundcard.

If that review doesn’t help you make up your mind, head over to Guru3D for more extensive review on Xtreme Music and Fatal1ty. Also, you might already know that there were issues when you plug X-Fi Xtreme Music or Platinum into Nforce 4 boards, there’s only 2 things to do when facing such problem. Either try to update your motherboard BIOS, or send it back to exchange for the card with updated EEPROM settings. This is a known problem ever since the launch of the soundcard, they should be shipping only the updated EEPROM cards now but just in case.