What to leave out ?

[puntoMX]

Naaa, you are over reacting, the drivers aren’t the best side of Creative, that’s true, but the audio chip is well made. I agree that it doesn’t support hardware 6.1 or NEO but still it works fine.

With the "new" HD sound chips onboard theses days, Creative is loosing ground and yes there are better cards if you can get them in your country, but I can’t get them from a local dealer here, not like you in Holland or like guys in USA or Canada.

Any way, Creative is cool for gamers that use EAX...

[CoffeeFiend]

Naaa, you are over reacting, the drivers aren’t the best side of Creative, that’s true, but the audio chip is well made. I agree that it doesn’t support hardware 6.1 or NEO but still it works fine.

Well, what's the point of having good hardware if the drivers suck badly? It's still makes for a dysfunctional POS. Perhaps you've never bought a SB Live 5.1 a few years ago. The AC3 passthru for Win2k was broken, for YEARS (was only fixed at some point past SP2). And since I had bought the card to get 5.1 sound from DVDs, that was frustrating to say the least.

The drivers for XP? Their very own instructions, right from their website: Install your win98 drivers from your existing CD, then install this thing over it after. Nevermind the Win98 VXD-based drivers did BSOD WinXP... Then reboot, hope it doesn't crash, and install these WDM drivers on top. Wow. Now THAT'S quality software if I've ever seen any

And these was the issue with SB Lives used with via KT133 chipsets, which would make Win98 BSOD every 5 minutes. PCI latency patches only made win98 crash a bit less often (still like twice a day). Without the SB Live, the system ran just fine (even though KT133 wasn't exactly a great chipset either)

We never got the promised ASIO drivers either.

They're well known for over-stating their specs (borderline outright lying - like the 24/96 claims about the Audigy)

And now they want to charge for driver downloads.

I would have expected more from a card I've paid 350$ for (plat version with live drive). I'd say that's the single piece of hardware I've bought that had the absolute worst drivers I've ever seen, and perhaps the worst support too.

EAX is perhaps the ONLY good thing about creative's cards. Nevermind Aureal A3D was far better (but they were sued into oblivion by creative who didn't even have a case)

Anyhow. I vote with my money, and I'll only buy a creative card as the VERY LAST option, just before having no sound at all on my PC.

[ripken204]

crahak-eax is the only thing that creative has, which i could care less about.

also for onboard vs sound card, for my friend it made a huge difference, i heard it myself, and i have the same mobo as he does.

[puntoMX]

Well, what's the point of having good hardware if the drivers suck badly? It's still makes for a dysfunctional POS. Perhaps you've never bought a SB Live 5.1 a few years ago. The AC3 passthru for Win2k was broken, for YEARS (was only fixed at some point past SP2). And since I had bought the card to get 5.1 sound from DVDs, that was frustrating to say the least.

There are third party drivers that are better and I used them with my Soundblaster Live! 5.1. I used W2K Server at that time and AC3 worked fine for me... some thing was really wrong with your setup there.

The drivers for XP? Their very own instructions, right from their website: Install your win98 drivers from your existing CD, then install this thing over it after. Nevermind the Win98 VXD-based drivers did BSOD WinXP... Then reboot, hope it doesn't crash, and install these WDM drivers on top. Wow. Now THAT'S quality software if I've ever seen any

Like I said use third party drivers, they work way better although they are old now .

And these was the issue with SB Lives used with via KT133 chipsets, which would make Win98 BSOD every 5 minutes. PCI latency patches only made win98 crash a bit less often (still like twice a day). Without the SB Live, the system ran just fine (even though KT133 wasn't exactly a great chipset either)

Yes, that is known, but there were a lot of BIOSes out there to fix the data corruption problem and it wasn’t just a driver thing from Creative.

And now they want to charge for driver downloads.

What the... Where do you get that from, is this for real? D*mn... Give me a link on that please...

EAX is perhaps the ONLY good thing about creative's cards. Nevermind Aureal A3D was far better (but they were sued into oblivion by creative who didn't even have a case)

Jup Aureal A3D was better...

Any way, on the end we agree that the Creative driver support sux, also with webcams and other stuff. But the 1k chip isn’t a bad chip and has a pretty good DAC. In combination with a third party driver the card works **** good and you could program the card, something that was only found at a lot more expensive cards those days...

[CoffeeFiend]

There are third party drivers that are better and I used them with my Soundblaster Live! 5.1. I used W2K Server at that time and AC3 worked fine for me... some thing was really wrong with your setup there.

3rd party drivers working doesn't make it a good card. AC3 did NOT passthru work with win2k, and it was NOT something to do with my setup. It didn't work for anybody who were using creative's drivers. Took 'em forever to fix it. That's a very well known issue. Even then sometimes you needed to replace DLLs to get it working (past SP2). Nothing wrong with my setup (other than using a creative card, that is)

Like I said use third party drivers, they work way better although they are old now .

Well, so you see it perfectly normal to buy ok hardware but with s***tiest drivers ever made, and then rely on others to hopefully make drivers for it? I'd say having half decent drivers is a very basic requirement. I've had issues with other companies' drivers before (nvidia), but nothing that REQUIRED me to use 3rd party drivers to get basic functionnality or for my PC not to BSOD. It's TOTALLY unacceptable, even if there are 3rd party drivers.

What the... Where do you get that from, is this for real? D*mn... Give me a link on that please...

Well, back when XP came out, they only had that Win98-driver "patch" (like I mentionned before) on their website. They did have full WDM drivers made for XP, but you had to pay 15$ to be sent a CD (why pay pennies for a couple MBs of bandwidth to support a 350$ card when you can ask 15$ for a half cent CD?) And it's still that way. Want the remote to work with the live drive? They've got updates to the required software ("remote center") on their website - not the full thing, so you gotta install the app from your win98 drivers CD still or it won't even install. Or again, buy the CD... And buy another CD when Vista's out too... Not the level of support I expect out of a 350$ card.

DAC wise, I disagree too. They're well known to be overly "enthusiastic" about their specs. Or if you look at the audigy's [Phillips] DACs, which support 24/96 (it even says so right on the box) - but it's just too bad the 10k2 can NOT feed it with that (16/48 only), making it pointless (well, except they can write "24/96 DACs!" in big everywhere) Their DACs are truly NO better than comparable cards from other companies at the same price point (often worse)

And I'm still skippin a lot of stuff, like the APS 2.0 driver being cancelled.

Anyway. Long story short, kX drivers is NO excuse for creative's drivers sucking so badly. And PC hardware without proper drivers is really just an expensive paperweight.

[puntoMX]

Wow, almost I thought you were going to kill the guys at Creative in person, using one of my arms or legs to beat them to dead B) .

Any way, if you didn’t liked the card why didn’t you return it to the shop. Also no one was telling you to buy that card by force. So much hate for a computer part... I’m sorry can’t stop laughing about it... It’s not to flame you or to p*** you off that I post here.

Any way, I hope you have a better card (or chip) now .

[CoffeeFiend]

I have NO idea why you're saying this. It's truly nothing personnal. It's just that I can recognize hardware with s***ty drivers and no support when I see some, and never buy that junk again. If you ever had bought similar junk that just isn't supported by their maker, and gone thru basically hell for years with it, you'd wouldn't be praising them either. Creative is to sound cards what Norton is to Antiviruses, or what netburst is to CPUs. Lots of people still buy the junk because of clever marketing, but it's clearly sub-par.

And yes, I definitely have a better card now (BlueGears in the main PC, also an M-Audio in another).

[Reino]

For over 4 years now I've been using the Realtek ALC650 (nVidia SoundStorm) on my Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe.

It produces magnificent sound. Many times I've been accused of "radar-user" because I could (and still can) hear people very good around the corner. I'm not sure about the Intel HDA (high definition audio), but back then the nVidia nForce2 MPC was the best onboard solution available. It even got put up against the Creative Audigy 2 in this review, and they're quite on par with eachother.

[Jeremy]

I've been using my Creative SBL 5.1 for over 3 years and never had any issues with it nor any complaint about the sound quality. I reckon I'm just used to it, but from a salesperson's perspective, if the customer doesn't complain, then what's the problem?