buckeye wrote:

Thinking about the getting the Mx-300 sound card but was wondering if it's THAT much better than the SB Live in Win98, which I currently have.

If you want to check out how A3D sounds, especially over headphones, absolutely. For standard games, not so much.

Both nice cards - A3D is fun but not a must have. And the MX300 has a wavetable header which is also fun but then you have easy sound fonts on the Live!

In saying that I'd still rush out and buy a Vortex2 based card because more sounds cards = better quality of life 😀

I had a Monster Sound MX300 back in the day, still have it along with a bunch of 3rd party Aureal cards (some with optical out). The MX300 does have a wavetable output which I connected something to (forget what I used) and the back header goes to a digital coax out board which I never bothered to get. Some Gateway OEM Boston Acoustics speakers of the era use coax digital inputs from what I remembered.
A3D is fun to mess with and quite a few games used it.