
Just got this card yesterday, hooked it up and BAM!!! .....the music played so nice and clear. I noticed a difference right away expecialy me comming from using an integrated sound card. Would recommend this card to any serious music/gamer.






You just can’t argue with SoundBlaster sound cards. They’ve been around forever, and have one of the best names in the market. This is a really nice sound card, not absolute top hand… But you would really need to be a picky audiophile to notice.




The description doesn't say yes or no to Linux, so it was a gamble. Purchased for a Lenovo T520 running Ubuntu whose right channel doesn't work, either internal or external speakers. Plugged it in, went to audio settings, hardware tab, selected it, and now have sound in both speakers.

I needed an amp/boost for Sennheiser Game Zero headset. The U5 has boost, equalizer, that has better quality than the Sound Blaster Z pcie. The different modes(audio config) do work well. Not sure if I'll use live, cave, enhancements much, the studio sounds best for my needs. Playing BF or GTA 5, the sounds are clear and bass where you want it. The best feature is being able to switch from headset to speakers with pushing the button in game, where doing this with before would usually cancel any sound in game. Also gives my Logitech 2.1 speakers a great boost and sound clarity. Had no difficulty with downloading, installing the driver.


Got this because it's compatible with Windows 98 Upon boot, Win 98 detected it, it installed a PCE-E to PCI bridge chip driver. I had to install the driver manually after, but that's just Windows 98 being bad.

The sound card has very rarely failed to do what it claims to do and I highly recommend it to you. Yes it does have a mic/headset plugin and I have no final complaints


I bought it to install on an old computer because the built-in sound card no longer worked. The sound quality is okay but not as good as the PCI-e version I also bought. It also comes with a driver disk.



+ Under 100 USD (paid 99USD on the Black Friday Deal). + Supports DSD over PCM up to DSD128. + Sound quality is on par, if not better than the Dragonfly Red DAC at less than half the price. + Gaming related features are pretty great with realtime virtual surround sound effect. + Hardware Dolby decoding included