Creative Sound Blaster Z PCIe 116dB SNR Gaming Sound Card with 600 ohm Headphone Amp and Beamforming Microphone

Pros: Once again, since 2001 I've been buying discrete cards and this is my 4th CSB card. On-board sound will never compare to discrete cards and in my cases the sound chip on the motherboard will have no adjustment features, such as BASS & TREBLE, at least that's why Asus came with, just the chip and a mediocre sound, that couldn't even deliver to a $20 pair of Sony headsets. With the new SB-Z, I cannot even get to level 7 before getting extremely loud and now my $20 headset sound like a $200 headset, sound is clear and have so many great features to tweak the sound with the software bundle included. The RED light doesn't bother me at all, the PC sits on the floor despite it's inside a Corsair 450D which has a huge acrylic panel. Yes, I'd definitely recommend the SB-Z, you can never go wrong with one of them, the difference between this and an on-board chips is a day and night difference. Don't have 2nd thoughts about thinking that it's not going to make a difference, buy it and you'll see that this is definitely a great improvement overall for your PC and luckily if you build another system in the near future, say 5 years from now, you'll definitely going to be able to re-use the SB-Z, just like I was able with my Audigy Gamer which I used for 10 years, till PCI was no longer supported on high-end motherboards. And yes, that Audigy Gamer is still in use in my 3rd system which is being used by my kids, and he uses it daily.

Cons: None.

Pros: finally creative builds some software that is not broken and fragile. sounds decent and software offers many tweaking options.

Cons: no color coding on the ports, i have several machines i switch out often and had to label the ports as i use 5.1 and a mic. could not get my older games to recognize eax even though the card specs say it is has it.

Overall Review: not worth the money unless your running a low end motherboard with entry level realtech.

Pros: Sound output is tighter and more defined than my Creative X-FI Extreme audio card from a couple of years ago. Software control panel is easier to navigate. Sound adjustments are fined tuned and much more subtle when compared to the X-Fi extreme. I use a simple Bose 2.1 desktop media speaker system. Probably 50-75w per channel with subwoofer. I installed The Soundblaster Z in my backup system with 5.1 speaker system. 90w per which is powerful. .Produced great sound there too. The wide array of Control Panel sound adjustments make the card versatile as far as listener preference output capabilities. I'm more of an audiophile than a gamer, but the card works well for my needs.. I installed this in a PCIE 4x slot on the MB which the manual recommends if a PCIE 1x slot is not available. Works fine.

Cons: Microphone does not have a manual on/off switch..It should have had one.. Red LED light is not for me. Prefer the color coded plugins for the speakers

Overall Review: A very good worthwhile product when offered at the sale price. Easy software installation. Auto software update. Certainly a big upgrade from onboard audio chips.

Pros: I have to give Creative credit. I didn't want another soundcard. I was happy to sit with my on-board audio that, while not perfect, did the job. However, after seeing that this has both a built-in headphone amp AND toslink in... I decided to give Creative another shot. The sound quality is amazing, and really brought out a lot more depth from my headset that I didn't know I'd been missing. And thanks to the toslink connector, I can far more easily route my Xbox through my computer and use my monitor's HDMI port for gaming.

Cons: The visual design of the card is unnecessary. It has a windowed case with ridiculously bright red LEDS. Once installled you can't see the card so it seems like a lot of overkill with little to no payoff.

Overall Review: After installing the soundcard and its drivers I lost the ability to use my second HDD and CD drive. Somehow, the driver package caused a conflict with my motherboard's SATA driver. Everything was fine after re-installing the driver. Weird fluke, but easy to fix.

Pros: Probably Uses Technology derived from Aureal Semiconductor Sale Price Free 4 Day Newegg Shipping Installed in a snap, Hardware and Software Cool Red Light and Red EMI Shielding Cover HAS ability to record WHAT YOU HEAR

Cons: I had to purchase something from creative Not an Aureal Vortex AU8830 (known as the Vortex 2)

Overall Review: It sounds great. I am pushing some BOSE COMPANION 2 SERIES II speaks and I knew they had to sound better then what I was hearing. I have owned more sound cards then I can count. creative, Asus, Aureal and Realtek onboard. After creative forced Aureal from business because Aureal had better tech I swore off creative. But, all three of the ASUS cards failed and no longer content to deal with sub par onboard sound I forced myself to buy the Z. After all 15 years is a long grudge If you want good sound for games/music for around $55 (and it does sound very good) then you can't go wrong with this card. Included is a beamforming (whatever that is) microphone which I left in the box. Windows 7 found drivers straightaway. On the creative disc is the usual software and drivers. They work but a lot of guys want the latest so maybe go to creative an dl all the newest. The stuff on the disc is from May 2014...hmmmm as is the stuff at creative Not a bad website Though I will forever have negative feelings toward creative's due to their treatment of a better tech company (Aureal) the card is worth the money.

Pros: I'll state right up front, this blows away any sound card or onboard motherboard chipset I have ever owned or heard. Absolutely crystal clear and the greatest 5.1 sound separation between the channels. Excellent

Cons: Jacks are not labelled. Why can't F, R, C be used so you don't have to use the manual. sheesh

Overall Review: This is installed on an ASUS 990FX R1 motherboard, AMD 8350 and 32GB memory. I uninstalled the RealTek sound from device manager. Uninstalled the drivers. Downloaded the lastest drivers from the SB website. Restarted into bios, disabled the onboard sound. Restarted, then shutdown. Installed the SoundBlaster Z, swapped over the speakers cables and restarted. Installed the new drivers from the website. Perfect install. Use the SB app to tweak the sound to your liking. What sweet sound.

Pros: FANTASTIC sound quality; I am not an audiophile by any means but the sound is soooooooo much better than the integrated audio on my motherboard. It's a much fuller, richer sound with more clarity all around. Real time Dolby/DTS encoding is GREAT! I know some audiophiles don't like using the optical output on a sound card, but I love the ability to use optical out with true surround sound for devices that need it (e.g. my Razer Chimera 5.1 headset). The software has a lot of options to customize the sound to your liking, which is really nice. You can set up a sound profile that you like for gaming, one that you like for music, and one that you like for movies. I really like the Dialogue Plus and Crystalizer features here - they make games and movies sound great on my speakers. The included microphone is good enough to be worth using. For the features and quality of sound, the price is pretty good.

Cons: This thing is crazy buggy. You had better be prepared to troubleshoot your system when you buy this. Here's my experience after a week of use: Installed the sound card, booted up my PC to find MSI Afterburner and my graphics drivers completely messed up. Had to do a full clean and reinstall of both. Then, after 10 minutes of playing games, got loud and obnoxious static over all audio that required the PC to be rebooted or the sound card to be reset in Device Manager to fix. This also occurred during youtube videos or pretty much anything else. As I was debugging the static issue, I found that it would also sometimes get confused about what audio channels were which, and it would swap all the outputs around in bizarre ways over both analogue and optical out. Reinstalled the drivers, cleaned out all my on-board drivers and audio devices and disabled on-board audio in BIOS, reseated the card in the PCI-e slot... no luck. Turns out that the problem was that the card needed to be in a different PCI-e slot. I changed the slot and since then, sound has been working perfectly. -1 eggs for all that hassle and for not working in whatever PCI-e slot I want. HOWEVER, there has been a marked increase in BSODs on my system as a result of this card. I mine BTC with my rig, so my GPUs are running 100% of the time, and while it was stable before, it now has about 1-2 BSODs per day. Often, playing with settings in the software while the GPUs are busy will cause a BSOD, so I'm fairly certain it's the sound blaster software that is the issue. -1 more egg for decreasing system system stability Also, the red LED is SUPER bright. Obnoxiously so. If you have a windowed case with any them other than gaudy red lighting, this card is going to look awful in your rig. It doesn't look so bad in my red-lit windowed Storm Trooper case, but for a lot of builds this would be -1 more egg. I think there's videos out there for how to disable it, but I bet that voids your warranty.

Overall Review: I hadn't used a dedicated sound card in about a decade before buying this, and this card reminded me why. The sound and the hardware is great, but the software and the implementation is stupidly buggy. I don't understand why having good sound in my PC means I have to have a less stable system that requires tons of troubleshooting to set up. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to keep this card or RMA it. Depends on how annoyed I get with BSODs while Bitcoin mining. I really do like the sound quality, and especially that I can finally get real surround output from my PC for my Chimera 5.1 headset, so I'll probably wind up keeping it. Creative's support is a bit slow at getting back to you, but they have been at least moderately helpful so far, which is good. I have this card hooked up via optical to a Razer Chimera 5.1 headset and via analogue to a set of Logitech Z906 speakers. My other hardware: i7-2600k 16GB DDR3-2133 ASRock z68 extreme7 gen3 (PCI-e 5 is the slot that worked... PCI-e 6 did not) 2xMSI R7970 Lightning Corsair AX1200 CM Storm Trooper Windows 7 x64 Home Premium

Pros: Much cleaner sound than the Recon3D that I had. I also upgraded from the X-Fi Titanium and must say that Creative has got this one right. I can only imagine how the Zx and ZxR sounds. The sound is much warmer and accurate. As far as games, positional audio is 360 degrees, which is what it should be. Good job Creative.

Cons: Can do without the bright LEDs.

Overall Review: This is an all around sound card from creative. This what the Recon3D should have been. I think Creative really listened this time. Software installed without issue on Windows 8 x64 and is not bloated, very easy to work with.