The enormous amount of capacitors and circuitry on the surface is also impressive. Its all black glossy PCB and gold I/O connectors looked very nice. Until I can get a Xonar, Im stuck with this but the drivers/software from ASUS are a joke for the software riser ASUS has bundled with our boards.
I will say however that when I pulled out the X-FI Xtreme music card I was impressed with the overall look of the card. Drivers for the Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio (SB) are below there havent been any driver updates since Total harmonic distortion + noise. So I can’t give you a real idea of the packaging. I received a press package which looks nothing like the retail box sold in stores. The included Creative MediaSource 3 allows users to SuperRip all their digital music permanently to Xtreme Fidelity and also users to upgrade their music content with access to X-Fi CMSS-3D, Smart Cross-Fade and Smart Volume Management. Either way, the card is entirely software based. Not sure why the CA0110 is even on the Audigy FX, being that the ALC898 supports 5.1, which is the limit of what the FX supports.
I actually have 2 of those cards laying around as well as a CA0106 based X-Fi XtremeAudio PCI. Depending on the application, you can do this by clicking on the toolbar of the application, or selecting Help Topics from the Help menu. To learn more about each application, refer to its online Help. The following software enables you to access the rich features of your audio device. With the X-Fi 24-bit Crystallizer, MP3 music and movies are converted to Xtreme Fidelity, making them sound even better than they do on their original CD or DVD recording. The CA0110 was used on the Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeAudio PCIe. Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Software Suite.
The Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic harnesses the full power of the Creative X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity audio processor to upgrade any existing library of MP3 files to the Xtreme Fidelity audio standard.