I got this card to replace a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card, and while the Santa Cruz was a good card in her day with her onboard Digital Signal Processor (DSP) rated at 420 MIPS processing power, her day has long since passed and the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS is simply in another class altogether. The original Audigy's DSP was rated @ 1000 MIPS, and Audigy 2's DSP is claimed to be approximately four times as powerful, putting it in the neighborhood of 4000 MIPS. So it would be unfair to compare the two, as it would be a kin to comparing a water melon to an apple or an orange.

I got this card from a leading online vendor, opening the shipping box and brushing aside the packing peanuts revealed an attractive retail box. Creative Labs knows how to package their products for maximum shelf appeal.

The hardware portion of the installation into my PC went smoothly except I did have to move it to a different PCI slot after software/driver installation in order to allow it to have an IRQ all to itself. IRQ issues are advanced user territory and I will not expound on them here, suffice to say that after software adn driver install I found the card to be sharing an IRQ with my 3Com NIC card. The Audigy 2 ZS still appeared to function properly w/ a shared IRQ, but I wanted it to have a unique IRQ so I moved it to a different slot and made it so.

There was really no drama to the installation that warrants reporting here; it went as smoothly as any card I've installed.

Note should be taken, however, to potential buyers who have an AMD processor installed on a motherboard with a VIA southbridge chipset. Recommend checking the support knowledge base on Creative's site to educate one's self on potential issues with the Audigy 2 and this chipset combo. My PC has AMD Athlon XP processor and nForce2 chipset and there have been no issues whatsoever yet observed with the Audigy 2 ZS.

To go into detail and attempt to cover all the features of this card such as THX, EAX HD, Surround, etc., would require more than one page. Suffice to say that I have found all features to work as advertised and the sound to be crisp, clear, and tight. There are several professional reviews online that detail these features. I only have an older analog 4.1 surround system and this card runs it much better than the Santa Cruz ever did. I never got much sound from my rear speakers with the Santa Cruz but with this card I get excellent fidelity out the rears. I do play a couple first person shooter games online and I can now hear things going on behind my virtual character that I never heard before.

I have nothing bad to say about this card. Driver support seems to be there from Creative, upon a quick check of the support area of their web site.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 84.99