Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Internal Sound Card

This is one of the best sound cards you can get for this price.Using it will give you around a 10FPS boost when gaming as it has a very low cpu load (if you have a onboard sound card, the sound processing load is sent to the cpu but with this card, all processing is handled within the card)It is great for working with audio editors and studio apps like FL studio as it has great asio support and can handle hundreds of sound streams at 1 time with out skipping and with out putting a heavy load on the cpu.This card does wonders for music. using the eax console, you can make all music really sound 20-30 times better, the advance eq has a feature that will increase the detail of all audio making all music sound much better.PS some people on many different forums have been able to use creative x-fi drivers for this card and enable x-fi sound features. (i don't recommend doing this unless your very skilled with regedit as theres a high risk of something going wrong and you will need to spend hours in the regedit tool in windows)

I bought this card as an upgrade for my default Dell system, having done a little shopping around for a good deal. I was attracted to this card for several reasons - A) It supports 5.1 surround sound (just got some new shiny speakers to play with y'see), B) I trust Creative to make a reliable and compatible product, since I'm not a computer whiz, and I don't have the time or experience to reconfigure stuff just to get it to work, and C) The price is just about right.Installation was a breeze - like always just follow the instructions carefully and make sure everything is connected before you close the case - this model comes with a separate cable to link the sound card to the digital port on the CD drive. My XP system detected everything right away, and the software installed without a hitch. There's a few different programs bundled with the card, including EAX, THX and speaker configuration support, all of which is nicely presented and was helpful when setting up my speakers. The 5.1 surround support is just as groovy as I'd hoped, and the card software made it a breeze to adjust the levels, configure Winamp 5 to play through all the channels, and add funky effects. I don't really have much use for all the software included, but I can imagine if you were starting from scratch, or, conversely, quite an advanced user, you might enjoy the various different functions included here. I'm a bit middle-of-the-road to need all the bells and whistles, but I appreciate them being there.So, easy to setup, easy to use, simmering with latent power and nicely priced. I admit that I was also persuaded to get this card for secret reason D) It came bundled with Raven Shield (and Angel of Darkness, but I'm treating that as a fancy test for my speakers rather than a `real' game...I'm such a snob) which sounds awesome through this card. A great buy for a lower end user who wants to ramp-up their audio experience without breaking the bank (or an eardrum). Recommended.

This sound card was and still is a very good sound card. It has good sound and is fairly easy to install. It has one very big problem however that it shares with the Sound Blaster Live! card. Both of these cards have built in game/midi ports on them. This wouldn't be a problem at all if Creative Labs were propertly supporting these cards anymore, but even though drivers for the card themselves are still available, drivers for the game port are not supported in Win 7 or Win Vista. So this leads to a situation where the card won't finish installing under Win 7 and Vista and if you don't turn it off you will get a prompt at boot up at times about ...finishing your sound card installation.... If you plan to use this card on a XP system then your covered as game port drivers are available for that OS. but if you plan to use it under Win 7 or Vista the best you can do if you want to get a game port driver installed is look for a third party driver and hope it works. (I had very little luck with this on an old SB Live! and finally settled on a third party one that seemed to work but it wasn't all that stable and I finally upgraded the card to a SB Audigy SE which has no game port on it and is still supported and works fine.) This is something to consider when buying this card.

I bought this because I wanted a firewire connection to edit video, while keeping my audio set up the way that I had it (I had a Creative Audigy card that worked fine with my Edirol speakers). The audio doesn't work at all on Windows XP nor the latest version of Ubuntu. I had to switch back to my old card. So now I'm out $90+

Creative Labs, the name instantly makes you think of a company that produces quality sound cards, speakers and other periperhals. In the past I have had success with them, but this time, everything went all so very wrong.I have a Athlon XP Asus Motherboard that runs at 2GHZ. 256mb or ram, ATI video card, etc. I have heard numeral issues regarding buggy software drivers with ASUS and ATI...From the start it was hell. Installation was a breeze, but soon it began to stress harm on my computer, constantly freezing it up. I had to uninstall the drivers in safe mode and all was fine.Not giving up, I installed the drivers again, same results.If the third time is suppose to be the charm, remind me that 2 strikes and your out. Third time, The sound blaster 2 zs slammed my computer, and to this day it will not finish it's post test.Creative Labs tech support is merely a copy and paste to our webpage link solution. Although they were prompt.If in the end I can't get my computer back, I'll rebuild WITHOUT Creative Labs. Only if you have the latest top of the line system or just looking for a guniea pig of a sound card, then by all means go with this one, else stay far away.