Cheap sound card?

How about a SoundBlaster Live!   $30 or so at wally-world

well

for $75 you can get a Audigy 2 ZS

or for $35 you can get a Audigy 2 SE

i recommend stretching your budget to the Audigy 2 ZS, if you can't then i would stick with onboard sound for now, and wait till you can get something a little better, with onboard sound not sounding so bad these days it might be senseless for you to get a soundcard that isn't half way decent, if i were you i would save your money and take next weeks paycheck and put it toward an X-Fi Xtreme Music, if your just really tight on the $50 get the Audigy SE

Yeahp. You can't go really wrong with an Audigy 4SE, sweetspot @ at this price range, but there's a bunch of other choices too:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?N=2010360...

...and ya know you can't really beat NewEgg.

Thanks for the response guys. I guess I should have said I wanted to get get something better than SB Live since mine died.

heard that SB has tons of bloatware now, I'm think about getting the Diamond XtremeSound XS71 7.1 from newegg. Good choice for a budget card?

You can still get a Creative made card and avoid the bloatware. Simply download the drivers from their website as opposed to using the CD-based drivers. When you do this, you'll only get the lean drivers, not all the other fat. The web-based drivers are about 95% fat-free.

Or search for some hacked drivers (just drivers, no apps). There may even just be drivers with Windows!?!?

For the Live! there are drivers that work fine native in WinXP, I'm listening with them now. No fat, just drivers.

hmm...

What's the diff between the SB audigy SE retail version and oem version except the packaging? Do they both come with the same warranty?

thanx

they are identical just no fancy box