Creative Sound Blaster Recon3D - Did I waste my money?

Hey all, this is my first time posting on here.

Yesterday I bought myself the Creative Sound Blaster Recon3D because there was a nice deal on it & I wanted to splurge on myself a little bit. I wouldn't call myself an audiophile but was just hoping to have something beefier in my system to have for a long time. I do mid-level video editing (local band music videos & promos), I also work for a small game company doing promotional videos for them (Youtube/website) & testing the games and I'm also a bit of a gamer (not super hardcore about it) and I was also hoping to use my PC as an HTPC (I don't mind just 5.1), so I when I checked out what it said on Neweggs, I really liked it. It seemed to pretty much be what I wanted without going overboard or into the deep audiophile realm.

There's a big debate whether sounds cards are worth it or not but I knew that going in. My issue is regarding the Recon3D and if I should of went with something else in similar price. I was enthralled with the "quad core" processor and I also read there were less driver issues with this card. I installed it today and everything sounds good and fine but after searching on other forums more (I should of did this more earlier *slaps self*) people mentioned that much of what's going on is software emulated, not hardware. Some mentioned it wasn't really "quadcore", and just rehashed old tech. So what did I just buy? A fancy PCB? I was actually hoping more of the entire process was going on the card, such as off-loading work from the CPU. I could be wrong though. The Creative forums has 2 people saying it's software, a 1 saying hardware.

Should I take it back and try to find this one? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168... or something similar?