If you like music with a touch of audiophile in you, Xonar Essence ST(PCI) or Essence STX(PCI-E) are great soundcards. They cost the same as a D2X though lol.

Asus Xonar DS, or DG, might be the card for you. Note: They are PCI cards.

I'm using creative soundblaster products for about 17 years or so now and never ever had one single problem to complain about.
AAA sound here with an first gen X-Fi right now.

Went through DOS 5.0 to 6.1, win 95, ME, XP, Vista 32 and 64 Bit as well as Windows 7 64.
I never had a single issue with creative drivers.
Friends often had different products and I always came to the conclusion, that my soundblaster sounds better and is more accessible than any other stuff. I'm fully satisfied for ages now.

Can only recommend creative from my point of view.
Face it ;)

It is, but I got a rare bargain on Ebay for mine, it was not long after they came out and not many knew how good they were, the other bidders were easy meat :cool:

LoL cre8tive Delay I've never seen a sound card fan boy before :)

Do you work for Creative Labs? But hey ... if it works for you fair play.

lol. He does have a point though. Soundblaster was almost the default for dos games back then, it was semi plug and play. If you had a generic sound card you almost allways had to mess with IRQs and DMAs to get the damn thing to work. Ah the fun of making boot disks.

Unless you are doing some manner of sound mixing, or have $500+ speakers you are not going to notice any difference. On-board sound these days is great, and telling the difference between it and a real sound card usually requires cranking the volume up past safe hearing levels.

Are you hearing some manner of static or distortion? Or is there some cash burning a hole in your pocket?

Oh I agree, I go back to DOS 5 as well, owned quite a few Sounblaster's in my time, under this very desk is an old P200 with a Matrox card and an original 3DFX mk 1 card I've put together for nostalgia with DOS 6.22 on it as an OS, folk these days have no idea of the hassle we had back then, trying to free up enough conventional memory to run Strike Commander and such like, fun though.

Much as Creative have had some good cards, they have made some garbage too, also there was that case where they lost a lot of customers when they tried to stop a third party guy making free drivers for Audigy's and such like that Creative refused to carry on supporting for Vista I think it was, they backed down on that one, they had to.

I don't think I'd ever support any bit of silicon to the hilt, as soon as I see something better I'll go for it, no brand loyalty here :)

The biggest advantage of a sound card is that you can pair it with good set of headphones = cheapest way to have a good sound, as some audiophiles would say.

Other than that, the statement is true. If you have crappy speakers / amp (particularly if you use any kind of PC speakers) investing in a sound card is not going to help much. Xonar DG/DS is the best option then.


Essence is an under priced product, for what it offers IMO. The only downside is that after trying your MP3's with this - you will be forced to switch to FLAC. :)


Be careful of that - double check with your MBO.

xFi Extreme Gamer in my rig (Creative), superb card.

as for my nick: this is only a coincidence and has got nothing to do with creative labs :)

But you are right, I'm a fanboy to put it that way. But my mood could easily change if I would run into problems with creative labs sometime. My money will always be invested properly, even if that means to change my brand 8)
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As to onboard sound: unless you have a decent soundprocessor on your mainboard, never go with onboard sound. The sound might be ok nowadys but the performance isn't. Your CPU has got to process sound here.
Using a soundcard frees ur CPU and that way increases your fps :)
Also, a onboard soundcard is most likely not capable of bringing you complex sound effects or precise surrond positioning.