It depends on your use case.
Any PCI+based sound card or onboard sound should do.

I recall using a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz back in the day when 2000 was new. I always liked that card. It had solid sound quality. I'm not sure how all the caps on it have held up over the years though to put it in use today.

Nvidia SoundStorm maybe?

Why not an audigy 2 zs?

I also heard good things about that turtle beach card. Unfortunately never experienced one myself.

ptr1ck wrote on 2024-01-30, 17:16:

I recall using a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz back in the day when 2000 was new. I always liked that card. It had solid sound quality. I'm not sure how all the caps on it have held up over the years though to put it in use today.

I have one of these. I was actually considering the Santa Cruz (CS4630) or Terratec DMX XFire 1024 (CS4624) myself..

st31276a wrote on 2024-01-30, 18:07:

Why not an audigy 2 zs?

I also heard good things about that turtle beach card. Unfortunately never experienced one myself.

Well, mostly because it's kind of uninteresting to me at this point, so I was looking forward to try out something new..

Maybe an Aureal Vortex card? Outside of special API support, Windows sound cards are pretty much all the same imho.

It'd help if you clarified what you mean by "best". Biggest feature set? Greatest compatibility? Best SNR ratio? Nicest to look at?

elszgensa wrote on 2024-01-30, 21:29:

Maybe an Aureal Vortex card?

It'd help if you clarified what you mean by "best". Feature set? Compatibility? SNR ratio? Nicest to look at?

Doesn't Aureal Vortex have like, terrible WDM drivers?

What I meant by 'best' in the context of a Win 2K system was having good SNR, some kind of spatial audio support, a (soft) midi synth, optical/digital output, good drivers etc. Things you would want around the year 2000.

I had a Hercules Fortissimo II back then which I quite liked. Might be worth looking into for something different.

Shadzilla wrote on 2024-01-31, 08:34:

I had a Hercules Fortissimo II back then which I quite liked. Might be worth looking into for something different.

Interesting, card! I do not own this, but it looks very similar feature and quality-wise to the Terratec XFire 1024 (same chipset) and Turtle Beach Santa Cruz.

Were soundcard drivers really targeting Win2K with full featured drivers in 2001? Seems like the focus would still be 9x support at that time.

Sound Blaster based on the ES1373 chipset? It's one of the widest supported cards I know of.

I like to use Hercules Game Theatre XP.

I don't know about the absolute best quality, but I use several ES1371 and ES1373 "Creative" cards on my Windows 2000 boxes and they all work very well and are AC97 compliant, contrary to the ES1370. And they are cheap.

kolderman wrote on 2024-01-31, 10:28:

I like to use Hercules Game Theatre XP.

Ah, so this was Hercules' CS4630 card, the competitor to the Santa Cruz.

Amazing how all these Hercules cards completely flew under my radar!