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 Electronics : Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Sound Card (70SB073A00000) |
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Rating:  - Works great with vista
Excellent sound, way better than my onboard sound card which i was using before. Works great with vista, just make sure you use the drivers online.
Rating:  - High ROI
For such a reasonable price, and ease of installation (to Vista-32, no less), this sound card is sensational. This is the best ROI I have ever experienced in a hardware product. Intuitive directions and the software installation wizard made the entire process clock in at about 30 minutes.
The sound improvement from motherboard to 5.1 is absolutely astounding!
Rating:  - Lots of promises, not much to back it up
This card simply does not perform to it's product specifications and marketing claims. This can mostly be attributed to the terrible sound drivers that cause a multitude of problems. Such problems include random sound distortions, popping, broken microphone input etc. Yes that's right this XtremeGamer sound card does not currently feature working support for microphones. Customer support is also rather terrible so no one on the support forums has received any support for these problems. Do yourself a favor and look towards the Auzentech or BlueGear range of sound cards, as they actually function.
Rating: - Hit or Miss
I'm giving this item two stars since the majority of reviews have liked the product. However, I could not get the system to recognize the card in either of my two open PCI slots. Setup simply stated "no SB product detected" and immediately closed. Amazon only offers a refund on this type of product and not an exchange so there's no way to know it was a bad card or indicative of the line as a whole. Given the fair number of reviews citing compatibility issues I'd have to say this was most likely the cause.
The main problem with the board, though, is it's almost total lack of documentation. The only instructions including on the package is a basic quick start guide. No troubleshooting information whatsoever is provided out of the box. If you do have a problem, there's almost no way to even begin to know where to check. If there had a been more documentation, I would have spent more time working on the issue.
The setup program also could have offered additional options when it did not see the card. This is actually a rather silly oversight on Creative's behalf. Why would I put an SB disc into the machine and try to install drivers if I didn't actually have an SB product? The logical conclusion is that I did install the hardware but something is wrong. Rather than simply closing the setup program should provided suggestions or at least directed me to a troubleshooting guide.
Bottom line: it's a generally well reviewed card when it installs correctly. But you are taking a chance it won't work in your system.
Rating: - Best Sound Card
I came through this card while I was checking on Amazon about Creative products, and after reading the reviews, I decided to order one, after few days I received it, was surprised that the card looked kind of small and nothing special, so I installed it, and it was easy to install took me just few minutes, after that I tried to test it, I am at the time been using headphones and the results were fantastic, the sound is clear and the bass and treble are high. Can't wait to try it with 5.1 system. Now have my headphones on all the time :)
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