Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty: Ultra L33t

You may have heard of Johnathan Wendel -- he's the videogame equivalent of David Beckham. In that he's signed up for all sorts of celebrity endorsements, not that he has girly haircuts, a skinny ex-Spice Girl wife and a squeaky little voice.

In fact, he's now so cool to the geek elite that he can slap his 'handle' (that's his alias 'Fatal1ty', not anything rude, so stop sniggering at the back) on Creative's new sound card, despite the fact that he's usually seen gaming in nothing more than a pair of headphones. We would say 'w00t' if we were on an online forum, but we're proper journalists (we told you to stop sniggering), so we'll simply scowl at the thing instead.

The X-Fi Fatal1ty is certainly not for the n00b PC gamer. The sound card goes round the back of the machine but then there's an additional set of knobs, buttons and audio inputs that sits in the same bank as your CD tray. It looks pretty 'whack' if you have a standard beige PC, but in an Alienware it only adds to the over-the-top allure.

Apparently, with all this tricked-out hardware (including 64MB of on-board X-RAM, whatever that is), you can feel the bullets parting your hair in Battlefield 2. We reckon it's the finishing touch to the system we've built up specifically to play, er, long-term evaluate this game. If you fancy the very latest in EAX Advanced HD technology, then you can pick up this hardcore piece of audio equipment for around £200. -GC

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• Tags:
• Creative Labs,
• headphones,
• hardware,
• inputs,
• gaming