I have, or used to have, a bit of an anti-Creative bias.  It comes from having worked for one of their competitors several years ago, and having them stomp us completely in to the ground.  It’s not as ingrained as my anti-EA bias, though – as much as I still like to grumble occasionally about Creative, we still buy their sound cards because, well, the darned things are well supported.  Over the years, we’ve owned an SB16, a SBLive, an original Audigy back when that was High End PC Audio, and a couple of their portable media players.

Oh, and I bought an X-fi when I was building my current machine, because I wanted to build a machine that would play Vanguard Really Well, and using motherboard audio was Strongly Discouraged.

Vanguard didn’t last, but it’s not like I pulled the card or anything, it’s just been in there and it lets me check the “Use EAX” checkboxes in games.

Trouble is, I was looking something up recently – if you must know, I wanted to know just how bad Vista’s support was for hardware accelerated audio – and I realized that I needed to know which X-fi I’d bought.  This was news to me, because I’d always assumed that one X-fi was pretty much the same as any other, but apparently the line has some pretty significant differences between models.

I didn’t have the foggiest clue WHICH I had, and of course I hadn’t kept the box.

I started with Windows Device Manager, which reported that I had “X-fi Audio”, without specifying a model.  The manual and driver disks were, likewise, generic to the entire X-fi line.

I found the Creative manager app and tried running that; it told me that my Device ID was “100”, which didn’t help.

Eventually, after a fair bit of googling and a lot of grumbling, I found a page on Creative’s site that showed me where to find the product code on the X-fi, and even gave me a handy little chart for what product code meant what models.

The product code was, of course, printed on the back of the card, on a sticker next to the PCI card edge, and couldn’t be read without pulling the side off my case, then pulling out the special ductwork that Antec puts in their cases to cut noise, digging out a flashlight, scraping off dust, and copying out a four digit hex number that I could use to match to the product code chart on Creative’s site.

Apparently I have a “XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro”, by the way.  I’m not surprised that I blocked that particular monstrosity of a model name out.

Seriously, this is nuts.  Having to pull open your machine to find which of a half dozen – largely similar – models of sound card you have installed?  We’re supposed to be beyond this.

Consider yourselves grumbled at once again, Creative Technologies, and I am through with you.

Until the next time I need a new sound card, that is, or when I want to upgrade my Zen Xtra, I guess.  Just you watch yourselves, or I might buy a Zune instead.