Price Paid:  $4000.00

Summary:
The drivers for the Audigy Plat Ex are lousy. A clean install of XP and every update/patch and driver variation have failed to get beyond two channel stereo on my Creative Inspire 5.1 5700 speakers. The card itself is at fault, not anything else. The ports on the card alone will not send a signal out on the rear channel and when using the digital channel it will not generate a digital output for rear or center or subwoofer. So you're stuck with only the stereo front speaker output...

I have yet to find an easy or suitably stable solution to this problem after four days of driver testing.