Price Paid:  $199.00 from newegg

Summary:
Bought this for gaming, watching movies and music. Good THX controls. Works well with a 7.1 speaker system. The card looks nice and sleek with lots of inputs.

Strengths:
Lots of inputs.

Weaknesses:
In winxp, the Sound Blaster software loads up a lot of background devices. Some of these devices fail to start and need extra configuration to start under a SYSTEM process rather than a USER process.

Similar Products Used:
Audiology '97

Price Paid:  $200.00 from Local dealer

Summary:
Great!!!... for a while.

Price Paid:  $129.00 from BestBuy

Summary:
(Jan 2003) This card would not install on my Win98SE environment. Windows recognized the card and gameport but the CD provided would not run. The CD installs the Drivers and Software and after starting, reported that it could not detect any Sound Blaster Audio card on the system. Creative no longer accepts calls. All problems need to be reported by email from the web site. It took 4 days to get a response to the first email. Their one line suggestion did not work and it has now been another 4 days since I updated the problem report. I finally took the card back to BestBuy and exahnged for a Philips sound card which installed in 5 minutes and had no problem with the software detecting the Phillips card.

Price Paid:  $100.00 from best buy

Summary:
A damn good soundcard

Price Paid:  $129.00 from Compusa

Summary:
Just an all around great sound card. Drivers work well with almost anything. Exceptional quality sound but recommend 5.1 speakers. Works well with 2.1 but full effect needs the 5.1's or 6.1's. DVD Audio rocks....Can't believe the Clarity.

Software side a bit lacking but there is a decent media manager called Mediasource Go! Creative really needs to make a free player that rivals winamp or real player. Needs the bells and whistles like a graphic EQ.