don't recycle anything! 20yrs ago i purchased an awe64 gold /w 16mb ram on ebay for a total of $3.25 shipped. it's worth at least 100 times that now. everything will eventually be vintage...

stanwebber wrote on 2026-07-17, 01:10:

don't recycle anything! 20yrs ago i purchased an awe64 gold /w 16mb ram on ebay for a total of $3.25 shipped. it's worth at least 100 times that now. everything will eventually be vintage...

Agreed that you shouldn't recycle anything still working, but while everything will be vintage, that doesn't mean everything will be worth anywhere near 100 times as much.

Your AWE64Gold was a flagship product when new, the sort of thing many aspired to have but few could afford. Yours also had a rare, proprietary RAM expansion on it. That makes for a combination that people wanting a retro rig will actively be looking for, increasing value, both sentimental and financial.

By contrast OP's two cards are low-end OEM cards. Both still have their uses, but nobody will be looking for one of these specifically even if they want a system from the time they were sold; instead this is what they'll end up with if they can't find or afford the high-end cards from their generation. Compare it to the AWE64 Gold's generation - it's as if you had an old noisy OEM Vibra and an AWE64 Value with 512kB RAM instead of the Gold.

So yes, you'll probably find somebody interested in them (in particularl the Audigy 2 SE), but don't expect to get rich now or at some unspecified time in the future. The Audigy equivalent of the AWE64 Gold with RAM expansion is an Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro with its external breakout box. They will probably get very sought-after, although they're not there yet (I found a ZS Platinum non-Pro with internal 5.25" breakout box for EUR 25 a year or so ago)

Trying to stick one of these in a modern system is pointless:
- modern HDA integrated audio can do the job of playing back and recording plain audio as well as these cards.
- the Audigy cards could do positional audio (EAX, A3D) in hardware, but Windows stopped supporting that hardware with Vista. Even if you could get the card to work you couldn't use its most important feature
- its EMU10k2 chip can act as a MIDI wavetable synthesizer. That was a big thing in the day (same reason the AWE64 with its EMU8k was sought-after), but here again a modern OS can do that in software so no added value
The best you could do would be to get it to work as a 'dumb' sound CODEC doing exactly the same thing as your integrated audio, only the Audigy 2 SE might offer very slightly better SNR, and if that's whay you are after there are newer options that offer a lot more there with less struggle.

Better idea: build yourself a retro system with Windows 98SE and/or Windows XP. That is what these cards are designed for and where they can offer a lot of extra value over the dumb AC'97 integrated sound CODECs common in that era.

dionb wrote on 2026-07-21, 10:42:

So yes, you'll probably find somebody interested in them (in particularl the Audigy 2 SE)

Probably wouldn't get much interest in the 2SE even, given it's a basic audio codec with no hardware acceleration. The card acts as a license key to run all the audio processing on the CPU, so is really only suitable if you have an overpowered system.

dionb wrote on 2026-07-21, 10:42:

Your AWE64Gold was a flagship product when new, the sort of thing many aspired to have but few could afford. Yours also had a rare, proprietary RAM expansion on it. That makes for a combination that people wanting a retro rig will actively be looking for, increasing value, both sentimental and financial.

To be honest I don't really understand why AWE64 Gold is so expensive when you can just build a SIMM adapter for a regular or value AWE64...

Mike_ wrote on 2026-07-21, 12:37:

dionb wrote on 2026-07-21, 10:42:

Your AWE64Gold was a flagship product when new, the sort of thing many aspired to have but few could afford. Yours also had a rare, proprietary RAM expansion on it. That makes for a combination that people wanting a retro rig will actively be looking for, increasing value, both sentimental and financial.

To be honest I don't really understand why AWE64 Gold is so expensive when you can just build a SIMM adapter for a regular or value AWE64...

For the same reason people still pay a lot of money for a Gravis Ultrasound when you can just get a PicoGUS.

Also the Gold has SPDIF out and supposedly better SNR. But it's mainly just the top-of-the-line bragging rights. Same goes for any component type. There's nothing a Geforce 256 can do a GeForce4MX (or in many cases a Gf2MX) can't do faster and more efficiently, but the former is a collector's item while the latter is seen as less desirable low-end.

dionb wrote on 2026-07-21, 21:33:

For the same reason people still pay a lot of money for a Gravis Ultrasound when you can just get a PicoGUS.

Also the Gold has SPDIF out and supposedly better SNR. But it's mainly just the top-of-the-line bragging rights. Same goes for any component type. There's nothing a Geforce 256 can do a GeForce4MX (or in many cases a Gf2MX) can't do faster and more efficiently, but the former is a collector's item while the latter is seen as less desirable low-end.

Actually you can even solder a SPDIF header to a value AWE64, and I'd say there's some difference between building a SIMM adapter and a full reproduction of a sound card. But I guess you are right that it's about it being a collectible item.