Looks like a bog-standard CMI8378 card. Fine for Win9x, but with WDM drivers, so no sound in DOS-under-Windows. Pure DOS drivers are available, but as with any non-DMA PCI option, it's not great.

Phil's writeup:
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/c-media-cmi8738.html

What sort of motherboard are you using? If early PCI-only, things like DDMA, TDMA etc might be available, maybe even PC/PCI - SBLINK. In that case other cards with ESS or Yamaha chipsets might do a lot better under DOS.

Will be moving from 98SE to Win 2000 on reflection for better support of USB. This card still ok for Windows use ? .. has 2K support and the drivers seem fully featured as it can get for such a cheap card (Minus DOS stuff)

Motherboard I am using is a TMC ti5vg+, AMD 550MHz K6-2 CPU and 128MB RAM.

Also SB AWE64 and Vortex 2 prices on ebay are utter madness, hence going for the cheap option..

Back in the day I bought a Philips SeismicEdge (PSC705) sound card for my PC, and it was horrible. It used Philips' own chip and the driver support was very bad. After trying to live with it for a year or so I ripped it out and replaced with an SB Live!. So my first instinct when I see a Philips-branded sound card is to kill it with fire 😁

ShovelKnight wrote on 2020-05-11, 18:59:

Back in the day I bought a Philips SeismicEdge (PSC705) sound card for my PC, and it was horrible. It used Philips' own chip and the driver support was very bad. After trying to live with it for a year or so I ripped it out and replaced with an SB Live!. So my first instinct when I see a Philips-branded sound card is to kill it with fire 😁

I hear the early Creative PCI cards are trash to driver wise, and also the cards themselves may have serious issues on some VIA chipsets maybe including the one on my board..

Seismic Edge has the VLSI Thunderbird Avenger or Thunderbird 128 chip. It's a QSound-based accelerator chip. Not too bad for EAX and 3D positioning. But if you had the older Thunderbird 128 instead of Avenger, you never got fully functional Win2K/XP drivers and that sucked.

Xs1nX wrote on 2020-05-11, 16:21:

Will be moving from 98SE to Win 2000 on reflection for better support of USB. This card still ok for Windows use ? .. has 2K support and the drivers seem fully featured as it can get for such a cheap card (Minus DOS stuff)[/]
Yes, support under 2k is fine.
[q]Motherboard I am using is a TMC ti5vg+, AMD 550MHz K6-2 CPU and 128MB RAM.

That's an So7 motherboard with multiple ISA slots. If you want to use DOS, you'd be must better of with an ISA sound card (almost *any* ISA sound card). DOS-under-Win2k is less of an option than under Win98Se, and this machine is too slow for DOSbox, so you seem to be heading towards a dual-boot situation. In that case I'd recommend a second, ISA, card next to the CMI8378 (which is fine for Windows). As for what, that depends on your budget, what's available near you, what you want to run and how long you want to wait for the ideal option to show up. In general I recommend later Aztech (AZT2320 or - better - AZT2316) based bug-free SBPro2 + WSS clones as cheap, reliable and easy to find, but you can make this as simple or as complicated (and expensive) as you like.

I do actually have a Aztech 2316R ISA card but I had little luck getting it to work in Pure DOS in the past, and its windows drivers were poor as well and hilariously out of date and mostly designed for windows 3.1 it would seem.

Xs1nX wrote on 2020-05-12, 10:30:

I do actually have a Aztech 2316R ISA card but I had little luck getting it to work in Pure DOS in the past, and its windows drivers were poor as well and hilariously out of date and mostly designed for windows 3.1 it would seem.

Give it another try then. In DOS it's pretty simple, you need CONFIG.EXE to set resources. A220, I5, D1 generally works fine. Then on a PnP motherboard like that, reserve those resources in BIOS. If you don't do the last step, things go wrong - maybe why you had troubles in the past. I think CONFIG.EXE itself is pretty card-agnostic, but the driver pack it comes in depends on the card. Sounds like you already have them if you got it working in the past. As for Windows, remember it's non-PnP and 100% hardware compatible with an SBPro2.0. Just tell Windows you have an SBPro2.0 and it should work. But with the CMI8378, don't bother with Windows drivers for it. Use that card for Windows and the Aztech for DOS. Vice versa, don't bother with DOS drivers for the CMI8378, it can't do anything in DOS the AZT2316R can't do.

And today I found a Soundblaster Live I forgot I had .. AND also since I moved to XP for reasons I can also use my X-FI to ?

Seems I may have wasted that £16..