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If you want great sound and want to upset the neighbors, this is the card to buy. but after getting an rma, it only took eight days from the time I mailed them the broken one, until there was a new one on my door step. Their warranty service is great. I have to say that the overall performance of this car is fantastic.I have a logitech 530 speaker system which I was about to replace.It was combined with a sb audigy, but after buying this card, I completelychanged my mind. JF The only bad thing I have to say was when I recieved it, the I/o drive was defective. It was like waking the dead. I live in Mo.and creative is in Oklahoma.
Clear crisp sound, easy installation.If you want the best, get this setup. No doubt, Creative is the leader in sound reproduction. Much better than the onboard chip.
It wouldn't make sound except for some terrible noise with CMSS-3D on, and it would finally start functioning after half an hour of button pushing and waiting. I wits pressing the button again would switch back to the previous mode, or it would be nice if there was a button for each mode.
The CMSS-3D (simulated surround with stereo speakers or headphones) is very convincing, particularly with decent headphones. The Crystalizer mode is great, and gives music a lot more oomph.
This is a really good card. The game mode button only goes 1 way - once you're in game mode, you have to open the audio control panel, which is very slow, to switch back out of it.
I'm using this with a very nice and very large, however old, panasonic stereo system, and it sounds great. And it's great that it's pci-e x1, because most SLI motherboards have a pci-e x1 before the vga pci slot, and if you have the maximum # of video cards installed, there won't be free (regular) pci-slots.I initially had a lot of problems with this card because.
This problem went away after i installed the 64-bit vista drivers from the website and my motherboard drivers.The front panel is pretty cool and very convenient, though it can't do much.
No indications in Device Manager there are problems.The Creative update site installed two updates with no problems - so the lack of sound appears to not be detectable by anyone or any thing but me.Problem forwarded to Creative but no reply received. So far I have had no success with this card. No sound when the speakers are plugged in to the XFi card; these same speakers work just fine when plugged into the motherboard's audio out connections so I know they are not the problem.Had to reinstall XP Pro because of other problems and the XFi card's recognition of the speakers did not change.
I was blown away by the sound quality of this unit.It's a huge improvement over the onboard realtek chip.Clarity and directionalpositioning in games is amazing and music is vastly improved.The cmss-3d with headphones does a great job with 5.1 simulation.Also to note,installation on Vista was a breeze.I installed fromthe disc and let auto update do the rest.The software is a bit bloated but the bells and whistles are fun.You can also do a custominstall and select what you want.If you game or enjoy music you can't go wrong.I highly recommend this card.
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