i'm looking to get a new sound card since my last one finally made me mad enough to remove it permantly.

it was a Sound Blaster Live 5.1 Gamer (which came with UT2K, Theif 2, and MDK 2) and i've had nothing but problems with it since i first installed it. have had it for a few years now and it just kept getting worse. couldn't unplug my speakers and plug in my headphones without it freezing up my computer or giving me a blue screen/hardware-paritity error. oftentimes after this happened i would have no sound until i uninstalled/reinstalled drivers and mover the card to another slot.

i'm looking for opinions on a relatively cheap card to get.

I have no problems with my Live other than the HUGE CPU OVERHEAD it takes bringing my 305fps average in MDK2 down to 230.

Telling him how well your system runs with that card was a great recommendation for a new card, Cheap! nice!

Asherr: I got the Audigy2 which has worked quite well, but it tends to be a little pricey. You may want to check with EQ because I know he just was in the market for a new sound card. I have heard (note HEARD) that Turtle Beach is making some good affordable ones, but I dunno for sure.

I'm using onboard sound. Not that bad and no more stop errors from Creative's stupid drivers.

I've had the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card for nearly 4 years with no problems, and excellent performance, installed on atleast 2 computers. Been using the same drivers the whole time.

These days I think they only sell the Riviera, and the Catalina. May be ever better, as my card wasn't advertised for gamers, but it still rocks.

They're around the $30 - $50 range, btw.

Hey Asherr, you may want to check for chipset updates for Windows. I use a Live series card and was having quite a fiasco getting them to work with an older VIA chipset until I found chipset drivers for Windows which resolved the issue. Worth a try when it comes to money [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

I am very satisfied with my Audigy2 ZS, both under Windows (only install the bare minimum of creative sofware) and Linux (great Alsa support).

get an audigy, live's are, as they say, a fuckton of shit

I'm still rocking my Sound Blaster Live Value after about 6 years, might be time to retire the little fella

i got an audigy2 ZS for $100 from fry's, fucking ace card. I recently threw a cheap turtle beach card in my work pc and had some problems getting the provided drivers to actually install, and theres some quality issues i have with it as well. But i made the stupid mistake of buying an open item from fry's so that was probably what it was....