Pros: The best cheap sound card if you just want to hear sound through your speakers.
Cons: A little more money can get you a better Sound Blaster.

Don’t be fooled by the picture above where it says “Geared for Gaming”. This may have been true two years ago, but now there is a much better card called the Sound Blaster X-gamer that is much better for Gamers. I recently replaced my Sound Blaster...

Pros: Industry standard in computer audio. Best support. Best Card Overall
Cons: Does not have A3D 2.0 support for sound wave manipulaton

This is the best sound card on the market right now, period. When the Live! Value came out, I was a little worried because I did not know if I should pay for it knowing that the A3D 2.0 standard was on its way.

I had heard so much about it...

Pros: inexpensive, great for gaming, lots of features, very clean signal
Cons: mediocre software bundle, could be hard to find

Overall, this is a great card, but considering the price, and the barebones software bundle, you can tell this card is aimed mainly at conscientious budget gamers. The ad couldn't put it any better: Geared For Gaming.

First off, let me start...

Pros: everything is included
Cons: cheap speakers

Do you need great sound at a great price? Have I got a kit for you? Yes, a kit that includes everything you need to upgrade that aging sound system installed in you computer.

This kit includes everything you need, sound blaster live sound...

Pros: Excellent sound; very small card
Cons: The sound isn't very loud as it could be

I had to make a new computer with some really powerful components. When I was looking at sound cards I had narrowed it down to the sound card...the Creative Labs Live! Now I had four choices, the X-Gamer, MP3+, and the Value. The X-Gamer had three...

Pros: great for gaming, music, comes with good fx software.
Cons: awful for recording (guitar), pain to install on my motherboard

The Soundblaster Live Value is a great sounding, inexpensive sound card.

Gaming.
It works wonderfully for gaming, providing more channels than most games have sound effects. The software that comes with it even has preset...

Pros: Sound quality is outstanding...
Cons: None at this time...

When it became time to upgrade my old workstation I decided that I once again wanted a real sound card in lieu of one built into the motherboard. Those tend to produce mediocre sound and do not come with a wide range of features to play with; i.e....

Pros: 3D sound, good configuration utilities
Cons: not much bundled software, no onboard memory

While great for gaming, this card leaves much to be desired for the aspiring musician. Beneath the polished sheen of 3-D sound posistioning,a familiar beast resides; the Sound Blaster Live Value is more closer to the old Sound Blaster Awe 32, then it...

Pros: great dsp, cheap, marketshare, low cpu usage, support
Cons: not so good 3d gaming

Creative has been the leader in making sound cards, but this card is not as great as it is hyped up to be. Albeit, it is a great improvement over previous generations of sound cards, but it still lacks features that prevent me from loving this card.
...

Pros: Supports 3D positional audio and EAX, excellent sound quality
Cons: Liveware is worthless and Creative tends to be very, very slow at producing new drivers

The next generation of PC audio is here, and its name is Soundblaster Live!. I got a Soundblaster Live! Value about a year ago because the integrated audio in my Gateway was really quite awful. I chose the Live! Value because it had a low price, some...

Pros: Great sound, great price.
Cons: The usual Creative fudge duplex problems.

The folks at Creative may not appreciate my opinion of the SoundBlaster Live Value PCI soundcard as much as some of the others. This card sounds great, but in the past I have not been pleased with SoundBlaster cards. I’ve returned two of them: first the...

Pros: Excellent fidelity
Cons: None

We've all heard crappy soundcards that hisses and crackles and pops, annoyingly. My old soundcard was one of those combo cards with modem on it too, and I actually put up with it for over a year, depending on my mini-hifi set for my listening pleasure....

Pros: Nice sound...
Cons: but not from all of our speakers.

We just got this sound card in our new HP Pavillion pentium 4 PC. Brand new computer, just out of the box. When we set up our speakers (nice creative labs five-piece set) we began having problems.

After playing around with the setup and...

Pros: Great sound for little money
Cons: Doesn't have all the options of its cousin

Introduction

I really didn't need to upgrade my soundcard. It wasn't that bad it was a Creative Soundblaster 64 AWE. I just wanted to get closer to my buddy's Soundblaster Live! Platinum without spending the hearty fee that came along...

Pros: Good sound, compatibility and value.
Cons: I am not crazy about their software.

Having a Creative Live Value (OEM) card left over after building a computer, I decided to test it in parallel with my Diamond MX300 (OEM). Now I am sold on the Creative product.

My conclusions after testing are as follows:
* The sound...