Creative SOUND BLASTER X-Fi Platinum 7.1 Channels 24-bit 96KHz PCI Interface Sound Card

Pros: Lots of inputs. Coax and optical I/O are great for recording and using a digi to connect a stereo or home theatre. Front mount interface makes life easy so you don't have to pull out your machine every time you want to change something around. Only thing I had to connect in the rear was the analog connections for the surround. Good MIDI instruments, soundfont bank is nice. Good card for basic MIDI recording, gets the job done. Software interface is very nice, also. Simple to use (for the most part) and doesn't hog too many resources. Very easy to set everything up and a lot of options to choose form using the supplied software. NO POPPING at all during playback. The speakers will pop when changing some settings, however, and that is probably what they are talking about. So far I have had great quality form this card. Also make sure to set your levels correctly to avoid distortion!

Cons: The "Crystalizer" is extremely over rated. All it does it boost the highs and tighten up the transients to make low quality music sound good. It sounded fine for me at a low setting (around 25%), but anything more and it sounds fake and annoying. It's basically like the "loudness" button you get on some stereos. Having to switch modes is somewhat annoying but worth it overall. I also find that a lot of the options that are included with the software are almost useless. The EAX effects are stupid, it's basically a bunch of reverb effects that effect everything on the sound card. I have yet to find a use for it.

Overall Review: All in all a great deal. EAX is great for gaming. I can run BF2 on ultra high settings for sound (also enabling EAX) and it sounds great! Playing in surround is freakin' awesome. PLEASE NOTE: You can't get surround form this card with digital outs. You will get 2.1 only if you use it. To get surround through games you must use the analog outputs. I found this to be fine as you don't amazing quality from games. Upgrading from low audio settings to high was enough for me. I believe you can use the digital for surround if the signal is already in surround (like a DVD movie). The card cannot encode surround unless you buy an encoder to go with it. Just a warning, not really something bad. I use the coax digi for music and the analog outs for gaming. Sounds great both ways. NOTE: I paired this with the Logitech Z5500d's and they sound great! I suggest those as wel

Pros: After I got it up and running it sounds good and the remote is a good solid remote control not like most cheap flimsy sound card remotes.

Cons: The reason for all of the rebates and sale pressure on this card as well as the Xtreme card is that the card has a major conflict with with the NForce4 chipset found on many AMD mother boards. After I installed the card for the first time my computer would not even POST. I had some major problems and looking around on the internet it seems as though I was not the only one.

Overall Review: I had to clear my CMOS and update my BIOS then reinstall the card and all of its drivers. Then I had to shut down the computer reclear my CMOS boot up my computer and update the sound card driver before it started working correctly. If this procedure seems like no big deal to you then you can get a great sound card for the price, but if you are not sure how to do a lot of these fixes then you may want to steer clear of this card.

Pros: GREAT Dolby Digital Decoding and DTS Decoding. To OBGOW who ranked this top of the line 1 star - learn to use it. You docked this card 4 stars because you dont know how to work with it? People, if you want internal decoding select SPDIF from your DVD player and let the analog cords do the rest. If you want external optical decoding select "External Decoder" under bitstream options.

Cons: None, this thing is flawless and sounds as good as you can get. The only con is people are dumb enough to post bad ratings because they dont know how to use the software

Overall Review: Buy this card if you love playing games, listening to music, recording music, or watching movies with surround sound

Pros: This is a huge leap in sound quality from my Audigy2 NS Platinum. You will not be disapointed by the sound quality. Of course, you'll need to tweak various settings for the perfect edge, but that's expected when you buy a new product. It is worth the upgrade. Hardware installation is a snap, just make sure you have an extra external large drive bay ready.

Cons: I've owned several platinum series products in the past that includes the Live Drive. I can not understand that for years, Creative will not package a "round" cable to link the Live Drive with the sound card. They always give you the flat ribbon cable and they make the ends proprietary so no other cables will work. If you're space management conscience, you might not like the big long ribbon cable you have to try and hide inside your case. My other quirk is that if you have a case with a door on the front, you need an inch of clearance between the drives and the back of the door, or the door won't close because of the Live Drive's knobs that stick out. You'd think by now they'd make smaller profile knobs, or at least dials.

Overall Review: Creative always does a good job with the Platinum series. The Live drive is very useful. So far, the X-Fi series has not caused any compatibility problems like the Audigy Platinums did with Norton software. It's just the minor annoyances that irk me with this product.

Pros: Amazing card...I originally thought that the "X-Fi Experience" was all hype, but this card really does make things sound better. Not to mention the fact that the card allows BF2 running smoothly (I have a GeForce 7800GS, P4 3GHz HT, and 2GB of RAM and BF2 was laggy on integrated audio regardless of game settings).

Cons: Can't think of much, only that Creative included an ugly ribbon cable to connect the card to the 5.25" expansion bay breakout box. For a high end card such as this, they could have at least made it a rounded cable.

Overall Review: I had problems getting everything to behave itself upon installation. My video card reverted to 640x480 whenever the sound card was installed. I checked Creative's support site, and found a solution (set the AGP aperture size to the amount of RAM on the video card).

Pros: Dont settle for less than an Xi-Fi! Features and software are unparalled! Used it to hook up to a home theater system reciever. The audio console is the best with stereo Xpand and 24bit crystilizer. With THX options I can redirect bass to the subwoofer and set the cross over frequency.

Cons: Just found out that optical audio only outputs in all channels only during DVDs as only DVDs output in DTS or Dolby. Everything else including games use EAX and is only decoded on card, so optical out is useless.

Overall Review: To get full surround with a reciever had to connect using the multichannel in on the reciever. Also had to use 2 minijack to RCA (3poletoRCA) and one ipod/videocamera cable/minijack to video/audio RCA (4poletoRCA) and connect it to the back of the computer. There are more instructions online and in the reference

Pros: Love love love the 24bit cystalizer. Love the new knob design and the polished black finish, very chique. Its fast, 400MHZ (my first computer was slower). The 7.1 is delicious, and they've taken CMSS 3d to a new level. I don't use speakers anymore because the 3d surround on my Stereo headphones is better through this card.

Cons: No fire wire. Major downer for me, but the other features make up for it. No firmware available for people who bought it before the flaw was discovered. It didn't matter for me though, creativity saved me.

Overall Review: I heard some really terrifying things about this card when I first got it. People saying it doesn't work withy my Mobo, Well, heres some advice for all you A8NSLI Deluxe. Don't update the bios if you don't feel confortable with it. But heed my advice. Switch to Entertainment mode for music dvd's ect and you won't get that nasty crackling sound, Switch to game mode for gaming. If you don't you'll get that crackling with music because it over processes the data, because it doesn't have the quality levels of others. If you upgrade your bios (to most recent) I would say you get a 20% benefit. It's the best card EVER. Happiness awaits.

Pros: Everything good about this card can be read on the creative website. I'll only list what I didnt like in the cons since I know thats what people want to read.

Cons: The 24bit crystalizer does distort the bass if you turn it up too far with a sound source that isnt all that great. For instance in BF2 if it is turned up beyond 25% you can hear distortion. BUT using an DVD Audio CD or DVD video (high quality audio) the crystalizer works up to 80% with no distortion. As far as MP3s go its more arround 10% and the sound difference is very little.

Overall Review: Match this card with a set of Logitech z-5500 digital speakers and you've got a hellagood sound system :)