Packaging
Creative have elected to go with an aggressive design here, though one that thankfully avoids the silly random CGI of many product packages. Right away, you know that this is a Sound Blaster card, it’s meant for gamers, and it’s endorsed by this “Fatal1ty” fellow.
On the back, we get the usual laundry list of features and logos. Good use of bullet lists and bounding boxes to keep things readable here, which is a plus.
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On one side, we get a look at the card’s faceplate, with all the ports labeled by function. This is actually fairly useful, given the somewhat unusual layout of ports. On the other side, we have a testimony from Mr. Wendell.
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Opening things up, we see the card itself front and center, wrapped in plastic and wedged into a cardboard insert to hold it in place. With the packaging discarded, the contents of the box are pretty basic: the card itself, a driver and software disc, and a quick-start guide. As has become the norm, no printed manual is included.
A Closer Look
Turning the card on its side, we see the faceplate that will show up at the rear of your computer’s case when the card is installed. The usual complement of analog speaker jacks is present, though on this card the microphone and line-in jacks have been combined into a single “multi-in” jack. Whether the jack behaves as a microphone or line-in jack is controlled in software. Next to these are the two TOSLINK optical ports: one in and one out. This card has the ability to accept a full 5.1 digital audio stream and pass it through to the speakers, which is quite nice if you have a game console or blu-ray player that you want to use alongside the computer.
On the opposite side from the faceplate, we see the internal headers. The enclosed header on the left is for CDDA passthrough from an optical drive, and the bare header on the right handles front-panel connections. This header has more pins than usual, as this card is designed to be used with an optional I/O headunit that sits in a 5.25″ drive bay. A standard front-panel header also works, if you want to use that instead.
What a load of crap. Creatives drivers are utter garbage. I bought one of these cards about a month ago. I had UT3 crashing left, right and centre. Stalker Clear Sky was crashing and so was Fallout 3. Other games I’d tested seemed ok. Ripped out this pos and replaced it with my old sound card. Oh suprise suprise games now not crashing. I bought a Zonar and though thte sound was great the emulated EAX had it’s issues. Stalkers sound was fine apart from not being able to hear my own gun fire. That went back to the shop. Now i’m on a Auzentech Forte 7.1 and EVERYTHING is working the way it should. Just wish Creative could write working drivers !!
@Mythril
And I suppose you did this after cleaning out all traces of old drivers, so there would be no conflicts? Creative’s history with drivers is colorful, true, but I’ve had no issues with it across two different systems–except when I forgot to take out the old sound drivers first.
A lot of times people blame their problems with a new piece of hardware on the supplied drivers, when the real culprit is all the old drivers that have leftover bits and pieces still hooked into the system.
Just something to think about…
May I know some other ways to get new drivers from your blog?
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