Installation

Being a standard PCI add-in card, you won’t have any problems shoving it into your PC. Although, the number of PCI slots have been falling in wake of the smaller and faster PCI-e x1 slots. Make sure that you have a spare PCI slot that isn’t covered by your huge GPU cooler.

Creative have been preparing a PCI-e X-Fi since early 2007 and it’s based on a whole different chip due to the differences in the PCI/PCI-e architecture. This unfortunately means that the Prelude could become outdated shortly after it’s released by Creative immediately putting their PCI-e version on the market.

Even if this doesn’t happen, if Auzentech wish to use the PCI-e slot instead, they’ll have to completely remodel the board. Doesn’t sound like fun…

The drivers aren’t yet available on the Auzentech website at the time of this review, which means that you’ll actually have to use the provided CD instead of just downloading them.

The drivers that are provided on the CD are pretty much exactly the same as the Creative version, apart from the bottom status bar baring the name of Auzentech. As a result I have a feeling on what is going to happen…

As Creative have pushed the launch of this product without the final Auzentech drivers being ready, Auzentech have simply reskinned the Creative ones, and added support for their card. Once they have had more time to work on them, they’ll release their own drivers which will have all the same features, but be sporting the single cable digital output ability. It would seem like more work adding the ability to the existing console, than make their own. The current drivers seem like a stop-gap between now and when the ‘real’ drivers are introduced. That said, I could be wrong…