I'm not sure on this card... great deal on something that everyone says is a great card. In my experiance, it does not do as good as my old soundcard, some noname bundle of minijacks with 15% proc utilization. It is mostly fine, until I get more than 5 or 6 "voices"(streams of sound) combined at once. For example, in RTS's, when I watch workers harvesting something, instead of hearing the rhythmic pounding of axes on tree trunks, I hear a loud, distorted axe, then a quiet, muted, muffled axe. It is the same when I try several windows apps that produce sound at once. Also, when I am playing Civilization 2 while trying to listen to music, what I hear gets progressively worse until about a minute into it, when the music has degenerated into a loud zipping/buzzing sound.
Under most use, mine is fine, but sometimes, it really messes up. Maybe I got some kinda defective chip that disables software sound streams. I don't know. I got mine used off ebay for 3$ more than retail (stupid impulse-buying father).
By 90% of the accounts I have heard, there is nothing wrong with the card, and this is a pretty good deal on it, but I will stay away from buying anything not created by Creative's almost-monopoly on highend soundcards.
