yea i just bought Asus p5e x38 mobos, and yea it come with a suprimeFX 2 sound card. Ima gonna go out and buy a casing so the pc isnt fully set up yet. I already have a Creative Xtreme music sound card. So what it is i want to know is that what sound card is better. Oh yea i game more on the pc then i listen to music if it helps. And lastly if someone could recommend a good lcd (at least 1680 x 1050) for around $200-$280 it would b much appreciated. Thanx

If it's an older Creative card, it might have driver related problems while gaming. It's otherwise fine.

for a monitor, i would get the SAMSUNG 2053BW which is only $270 on newegg

I can tell you the XtremeMusic is great. I listen to music a lot with mine. You need good speakers to make it shine, of course.

I have no idea about the Asus product. Is it the same as the one bundled with the Asus Striker Extreme? That one was decent but not as good as the X-Fi cards.

If you use Vista you will have driver issues with the Creative.

if vista, or planning to upgrade within the lifetime of this product - asus, if still on XP, and you read a favourable review or something, get the creative
but frankly i think we need to boycott creative anyway to make them get their drivers sorted

I recently got the Xtremegamer, and it came with drivers specifically for Vista. And I haven't had any problems with it at all yet. The sound is pretty incredible too.

to be honest you proberly wont notice the differnce, but if you already have the X-fi use it anything tonot haev to use realtek audio.

LG make a good LCD screen in that price.
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Pro [...] tID=587955

thanx people, i wont be using vista. So i guess ill get that newegg lcd and keep the Creative, or ill just test both, cant take too long.

You see the thing is that people are bashing creative drivers on vista over and over, but they don't know the full story. They are fully behind their X-Fi lineup, the problem right now is with their old Audigy cards, but you know how some people have selective reading and miss that part. With this I'm not saying their X-Fi drivers are perfect for vista, but they are working on them.

To answer your question, Yes you should definitely use the XtremeMusic regardless of the OS, the whole reason the XtremeMusic was discontinued in the first place was because creative considered it was way too good for the price it was being sold.

Exactly, they want people to buy more expensive cards from them, by cutting driver support for older cards, and discontinue cards that are "too good for the price it was being sold."

That is garbage. Why would you want to deal with their excessive greed?

Thanks for the heads-up on the XtremeMusic; I hadn't realized it was discontinued.

Yes, discontinued but still fully supported by Creative drivers and ALchemy for free because it is part of the X-Fi family. Keep that in mind.

It might seem that I am defending creative (and I might be), but you have to realize something, these audigy cards are 6-7 years old and have already been EOL'd several years before the launch of vista. It does not make much sense for a company to keep developing drivers several years after a product has already been EOL'd. Remember that 5 years is an eternity in the technology loop, even for sound cards.

If you TRULY believe that the company should keep supporting these cards, then maybe we should ask for new driver releases for GeForce and GeForce 2 cards from nvidia and Radeon 8K series from Ati, I bet they'd be more than willing to keep supporting cards over 5 years old.

What I'm trying to say is, I rather have them focus their barely competent driver team on the X-Fi line up than ask for new drivers for a recently released OS (Vista) for hardware that is nearly a decade old. If you look at it this way, you paid maybe $100-150 for a sound card 6-8 years ago and it has served you so well so far, and it still serves you well under XP, but isn't it worth it to shell at least $100 for newer tech after so long?

I am disgusted by the fact that it took them over a year to have decent X-Fi drivers for Vista, but I'm not going to boycott them or say anything bad about them not wanting to support old tech that had already been EOL'd several years before the release of the OS, because I rather bash them over their inability to develop a working X-Fi product for Vista for so long.

Id have to agree with emp, from what i have read most issues now are only with the older Audigy and Live families, which have been EOL for a long time now.

I own a Fatal1y edition X-fi and i love it, although im not using vista i will be giving it a go soon and then i shall find out if these complaints about there vista drivers with x-fi's have any merit

Those are graphics cards, they move far faster. You should compare
hardware in the same category. Realtek onboard from that time period
are still being supported. With the kind of money Creative charge, why
can't they be expected to do the same, if not better?

Cause people stopped buying their cards.
On board sound became good enough for the average Joe.
A greatly reduced market calls for drastic changes.

Less money for the people in charge looks bad on paper.
So they cut support to a minimum (happend around 2005).
They were crappy at support before ...

A 5.1 Live was the last Creative card I owned.
I always hated onboard sollutions but bloatware by Creative is even worse.
When it died 1 year ago I just started using onboard.
ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe's was way better than this new Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3P onboard sollution.
It hisses and it crackles at times. I was thinking of buying a Creative card again.
Then they had this extreme event with Daniel_K. Now I'd rather have hissing and crackling.
And optical out is only available for front panel/break out box.
Gold plated IO? Fatal1ty/Premium only.

Where is my on card SPDIF/optical in/out? It's 2008 people.
I have a 1500 EUR surround receiver/amp.
I don't want a sound card without those!
And I really don't want your **** $30 break out box to get them!

I took out an old soundblaster live from old machine and plugged it into the new rig, and it produced crackles on game loading. It may have to do with PCI latency for the device though, and not the fault of the card itself. Took it out and switched to onboard, and had no problems whatsoever. It's just more compatible with the motherboard (X38-DS4), being onboard, runs more smoothly and produce fewer weird problems.

I just don't think Creative software is as good as Creative hardware.

After I finally decided that Creative wasn't going to update the drivers for my Audigy 2 ZS (I'm still running Windows XP), I switched to onboard sound. Bye-bye compatibility problems. Until Creative matches that reliability spec, I won't be buying any more Creative hardware.

Live Player (1999) cards are so old that XP doesn't even play properly with them. Windows 2K were the last system with great support for them.
Live 5.1 Player (I think I got mine in 2001) were supported by XP but I always had issues with the dirvers. Used mine on Win2K up until 2005. Cursed it ever since

The company that takes Creative's hardware people after they go byebye should start making onboard sollutions. Their sound quality is better there is no doubt in that. But all a modern soundcard needs is the 6 jack input/outputs, 2 RCA and 2x optical spdif input/outputs.

Asus has the right Idea with their SupremeFX module (much less system noise). Just put a Creative DSP on an expanssion board and some gold platted connectors. And let some open source people do the drivers. That "stealing our IP" idea is a great excuse for writting pisspoor driver packages.

The DX2 looks interesting (Asus).