Hah, looks like ASUS has got Creative sweating a wee bit, as they plan to release their new high-quality Xonar series soundcards in the very near future.

Seems it's taken this firey bit of competition for Creative to finally get off their arse and produce a PCIe based X-Fi card (gee, it's only taken them what? three years now), though personally I am still more impressed by the Xonar's feature-set. DTS:Connect and Dolby Live digital encoding on the fly, yummy!

The Inq have only very brief info about the PCIe X-Fi at this stage, and mention that it is likely to pop up sometime during the second half of the year.

SINCE ASUS DECIDED to launch its line of PCI and PCIe based soundcards named Xonar (we first wrote about this product here), Creative had no alternative but to kick up plans for a PCI Express based X-Fi sound card.

During our trip to Taiwan, we learned that Creative's riposte is set for introduction during second half of this year. In fact, it should be on the market for the "Back to School" shopping madness. Some samples are already floating around, so do not be surprised when pictures of PCIe cards start being leaked through different forums and news sites.