I had this budget sound card put in my older PC running XP because I had purchased 5.1 surround sound speakers which my older card could not provide. The card is positioned into an available PCI slot in your computer, and after disabling any older sound card from your bios to prevent any conflicts, the PC is rebooted and then you have to install the software and drivers that come provided in order for you to get the best out of the card.

The transformation was unbelievable! When I attached my 5.1 speakers into the back of the Audigy SE sound card, the difference was unreal. When I played songs in WMP or Winamp the quality and tones were on a par with my dedicated £600 Hi-Fi system. I would go even further to say it was probably slightly better!!

The installed software allows you to configure the sound card in various ways, also giving you special effects such as hall, or theatre etc.

If you run into any problems with configuration the software provides a configuration and diagnostic test which will tell you where you have gone wrong (hopefully)

For a so called low end "budget card" I really found this sound card of amazing and incredible value. When I bought it a few years back it cost me around £50 but I noticed that prices have come tumbling down and they can now be bought for as little as £20, which is unbelievable.

If you're like me and enjoy music on your PC and listening to videos and music on the internet then I highly recommend this sound card.

I realise there are far more powerful cards out there but they will only satisfy the really intense gamers who demand the best sound available when playing their games.

The back of the sound card has support for:-

Line level Out (Front / Rear / Side / Centre / Subwoofer) or Headphone Out

Line In / Microphone In / *Digital I/O

Aux Audio In

Supports SPDIF Out for Stereo Digital Speakers or SPDIF In/Out with Creative Digital I/O Module (sold separately).

This card doesn't work on Vista although the Creative website say there is an updated driver for it. Downloading this update may cause the loss of some of the functionality of the sound card. This is because Vista uses sound hardware in a totally different way to XP.