Installation

Unlike the X Plosion, this version contains a simply, but easy to understand manual which the X Plosion requires you to visit their site to read.

Installation is as simple as any other PCI card, but this time is a wise idea to choose the PCI slot that’s the furthest away from your graphics card to avoid shared PCI slots. While avoiding PCI sharing is impossible, this should lower the possibility of a conflict. If you have a motherboard that has PCI-e, then you can use any of the PCI slots as PCI-e is a different technology (point-to-point) rather than shared.

Before you start your PC with the new card installed, it’s a good idea to remove any onboard sound by disabling it in your BIOS beforehand.

If you chuck in the driver CD, you end up with a webpage to links to the driver software on the CD. Unfortunately, either FireFox doesn’t like this, or the CD is setup wrong, but the setup file doesn’t download correctly and you end up with a 20kb file. Instead, navigating the CD manually is a better plan.

Installing the software is easy, with a single program doing all the work for you. Simply click next and it’s done. It installs the same drivers as the X Plosion but Club 3D have wisely decided against including the MediaRack program, although they have included some ultra-crappy sound test games that many people will ignore (although I did get a high score on Rockwar…).