I have a very cheap SB Audigy SE (not sure). It does work fine though. Onboard audio (Realtek) was giving me compatibility issues with some games.

Most cheat PCI cards are using CMI8378 chips... the same chips you can find in old motherboards.

Asus makes good soundboards based in their "own" chips (AV100 and AV200)... which are good quality CMI chips (CMI8788, for example). Also, this cards appear to have good quality amplifiers.

Also, there are some X-Fi "clones"... audio cards with the same chipsets as Creative. I don't know if they're better, worse, cheaper or expensier.

IMHO, I would buy an Asus soundcard or stick with the onboard audio.

Why?
- Most PCI sound cards are not better than onboard audio.
- Creative doesn't update their drivers. For example, SB Live! has no drivers in Windows 7, and some cards are "downgraded" with newer OSs (I remember reading about some Audigy cards that had Dolby sound in XP, and hadn't Dolby in Vista... with creative drivers).
- Asus feels like it's going to update their drivers beyond Creative does, and appears to be quality cards.

The Vortex cards get a lot of praise, but I gotta say I'm not really that impressed with them. I've got a Vortex 2 here and it has been quite troublesome. At least I can use it as a host for me Yamaha DB60XG, else I would gladly put a Live! in its place!

I remember seeing a benchmark table here resulting that the Live! actually uses less cpu power , so it is a winner for my in win9x systems. Benchmark indicated more fps, who doesn't like that?

As for nowdays - at least for me - nothing beats a X-Fi (real one! not the re-branded crap). Even if you never use EAX or extra goodies the crystalizer function is just AWESOME. It really does work and makes mp3's/streams (practically all sounds) sound better.
Using a platinum model here that found it's way from my c2d setup to my i5 sandybridge one. I did try onboard audio on my gigabyte mobo but I was not impressed.
Right now I am drooling over a pci-e version of X-Fi.... 😊

I too prefer my Creative X-Fi Titanium over any other brand, have the latest Fatality model for PCIe 😉

I also love the Alchemy drivers for those older titles that do not show Hardware EAX support without enabling this for these titles, it basically gives back the hardware EAX support in these game.

As for older OS's I like the Live! or if you have an ISA bus board then an AWE64 is great.

I've heard lots of good things about the ALS4000-based cards, but i've never heard it myself.

I think there's an OPL4 PCI card too. Not sure though

damn BigBodZod, I am jealous! 🤣

I use these pci cards:

vortex2 cos of a3d and the db connector

sb live cos of soundfont capability and eax, ditto audigy zs

yamaha sp-724 cos it does genuine fm synth and xg-midi

santa cruz cos it sounds good and has db connector, oh and "turtle beach"
sounds cool anyway 🤣

Only 1 not in use right now is the santacruz; my perception is that it is a bit picky, best system for it was an abit an7 with xp3000.

keropi wrote:

damn BigBodZod, I am jealous! 🤣

and then I swapped out my X-Fi Fatality Platinum PCI into my file server/email box and took out my old Audigy 2 Platinum and boxed that up for future use 😉

I also got the X-Fi on sale at Frys Electronics because they now match the pricing that Newegg gives when they have sales too, $129.99 (USD) for the Titanium model, yes it came with the breakout box control!

Back On Topic, I remember using some of the Yamaha YMF724 and 744 chipset boards from Aopen years back, they had some decent driver support.

The Vortex cards get a lot of praise, but I gotta say I'm not really that impressed with them. I've got a Vortex 2 here and it has been quite troublesome.

My feeling about the Vortex cards is that they're great when they work. A3D is pretty cool, and the better Vortex boards (i.e., MX300, TB Montego) have better sound quality than the SB Live. But you're right, they can be quite a pain in the ass... you can pretty well forget using 'em in anything but Win9x, and they don't get along well with a fair number of common hardware configurations.

There's also the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. Its DOS compatibility is lacking, so it's not a very good choice if that's what you're going for, but it's still my favorite sound card for use in Windows. The sound quality is excellent, and the Sensaura 3D feature is awesome (especially with headphones). And, a seemingly rare feature amongst 'gaming' sound cards: the drivers are actually stable. 😳

leileilol wrote:

I've heard lots of good things about the ALS4000-based cards, but i've never heard it myself.

I think there's an OPL4 PCI card too. Not sure though

Now this is interesting, I never even heard of the ALS4000.

And about the Vortex, I used to hear they were quite highly rated, but I never heard one for myself. I thought I was using a Vortex, till I opened up the case and saw I had actually put a Yamaha SV550 sound card in there instead!

I'll go look for some info about the ALS4000, see what it is.
And about the SB Live!, it does seem to be a great choice for a retro rig (except for those corruption problems that sometimes may occur).

Keep the info coming, I'm reading all of it with great interest! 😉

I'm using an old Dynex DX-SC51 myself... it uses the VIA Envy24 chipset and is basically the last/newest thing that has the waveblaster heater... I have my DB50XG zip tied to it because it is much bigger than the sound card itself!

VIA has been very nice about releasing drivers... windows 7 is officially supported, and it also has QSound with it 😁
audio quality might not be the greatest because of the cheap components, but it works pretty good for the price

I was using a Vortex 2 in my win98 rig (P2 400, 2x 12MB Vooodoo 2 SLI, Abit BX6) and I had trouble installing drivers - the latest ones wouldn't work, even bluescreening Windows on boot. The .48 version was what I ended up using but they were a bit fiddly to install. Some games just don't like it either, such as Sin (GPF when starting game if hardware sound enabled)

But the 3d effect is amazing with headphones especially for something over 10 years old..

Zup wrote:

Why?
- Most PCI sound cards are not better than onboard audio.

There are exceptions. Back in the day onboard wasn't very good and used software emulation and cpu cycles to get work done which sucked for single core systems.
With current onboard audio with Digital (optical, SPDIF) will be very close if not as good as a add-on PCI/PCI-E card.
When using Analog output you can usually get better DAC's on the add-on cards soundcards thus the main reason to use one these days.

- Creative doesn't update their drivers. For example, SB Live! has no drivers in Windows 7, and some cards are "downgraded" with newer OSs (I remember reading about some Audigy cards that had Dolby sound in XP, and hadn't Dolby in Vista... with creative drivers).
- Asus feels like it's going to update their drivers beyond Creative does, and appears to be quality cards.

Creative made a statement they had no plans to support the SB Live! in Vista/Win7. Manufacturers won't waste resources recoding drivers with newer OS'es like HP and there older printers.

Both vista and win7 use Universal Audio Architecture. They did this to kill direct access to the soundcard hardware through DirectSound which have still been noted for many crashes/GPF's with older OS'es, (wanted Vista to be a very stable/resilient to 3rd-party driver crashes). This basically killed hardware support for EAX, X-RAM and other things. ASIO and OpenAL API's were not effected in this transition so Creative created ALChemy which translates EAX support from older games into OpenAL calls. Think of it like a wrapper of sorts like a glidewrapper.

As for cards. I was interested in the Diamond MX200, It used A3D 1.0 (almost no games use A3D 2.0 calls). and it had no support for dos except a line input you could hookup from your ISA card. This would help eliminate conflicts for DOS support and an open choice of ISA card. Hard to find these buggers!

The Diamond MX400 used Crystal Sensura tech that seemed interesting but weak.

If Windows XP is your OS of choice. I'd recommend the Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty Pro PCI or the like with X-RAM. I have one with the 64MB X-RAM. Quake 4 and Prey use it to help larger higher quality sound effects. I still haven't been able to use my X-Fi in full effect since I run Win7 🙁 There are a few Winamp Plugin's and such that can use the X-RAM, not very noteworthy though.

Tetrium wrote:

I know the Soundblaster Live! apparently had some difficulty with some VIA chipsets, resulting in corrupted data.

I use Live!s all the time with VIA 694A/X/T chipsets with no problems whatsoever so that particular incompatibility can be written off.

Yeah I should also note the 3D effect is not even that impressive. Just a lot of reverb and nothing else... Maybe something's wrong with my card but I don't really care to be honest 😜

One card I can recommend for (slightly older) PCs running DOSBox is the Terratec DMX 6Fire 24/96. Like the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz it's using a VIA Envy24 chip, but it offers more.

It has a nice front module, which you can mount inside a 5.25" bay, with a lot of connections. It has: RCA Line In, RCA Phono (for old LPs), RCA Line-Out, Digital In/Out, MIDI In/Out, Headphone (with volume control knob) and Mic-In (with volume control knob). Last but not least, you can mount a WaveBlaster-compatible daughterboard inside the front module, where it is nicely shielded from the rest of the system. The only potential downside is that the most recent drivers are dated October 2008 and they support Vista, but I don't know about Windows 7.

I'm using one of these cards in a Pentium IV computer running XP and it's an absolute joy to use. I got a Roland SCB-55 installed inside the front module and a Roland MT-32 hooked up to the MIDI-Out and Line-In on the front module, both offering superb audio quality in older games running inside DOSBox. 😀

As for more recent soundcards oriented towards more modern applications, I think it's mainly a battle between Creative and Asus. The X-Fi based cards are pretty good, although some dislike the somewhat bloated and sometimes unstable drivers. Asus' drivers are suffering less from these issues apparently, but the downside for games is that they emulate EAX and it's not always 100% accurate.

Having said that, I actually don't use a soundcard from either of these companies in my modern rig. 🤣 I'm using the Auzentech X-Fi Forte, which is a PCI-Express soundcard with the X-Fi chip on it. They also used to have a PCI card which is very similar, called the Auzentech X-Fi Prelude. It's really just like a regular X-Fi soundcard from Creative, but with better components (DAC and OPAMPs) and they come standard with Dolby Digital Live enabled. The X-Fi Forte also has a nice headphone amplifier, which comes in handy when using more high-end headphones. Auzentech also recently re-released a PCI soundcard with the CMI8788 chip on it, the Auzentech X-Meridian 2g. This card uses the same chip as the Asus cards, so it might be a good alternative for them.

I know of the terratec... I couldn't find it anywhere a couple of years ago (long out of production), so the dynex card was the next best thing... and dirt cheap too! 😀

windows 7 is officially supported as I said already about the dynex card... not officially by dynex, but officially by VIA themselves, the maker of the Envy24 chip

I'd love to get my hands on the terratec if I can find it!

TheMAN wrote:

windows 7 is officially supported as I said already about the dynex card... not officially by dynex, but officially by VIA themselves, the maker of the Envy24 chip

Yes, I know, but I'm fairly certain that Terratec uses modified drivers in order to be able to use the front module. I'm not sure whether the official drivers from VIA would work and whether the Terratec drivers are new enough to support Windows 7. I have never tried it.

TheMAN wrote:

I'd love to get my hands on the terratec if I can find it!

They seem to be fairly common here in the Netherlands, so I can help you in obtaining one from here if you like. If you're interested, just drop me a PM! 😀