inexpensive gaming card for vista 64

[D14JEFF]

ive read that vista 64 and creative sound cards dont play nice together . id like to take advantage of the eax effects in gameing so i guess i want something that does eax 4.0 or 5.0 . i dont think creative allows anything higher than 2.0 to be used by other card makers .
whats a poor gamer to do ???????

 

[plinko]

EAX is hugely overrated. Don't let it be the only determining factor when choosing a sound card.

 

[silverlai3]

ive read that vista 64 and creative sound cards dont play nice together . id like to take advantage of the eax effects in gameing so i guess i want something that does eax 4.0 or 5.0 . i dont think creative allows anything higher than 2.0 to be used by other card makers .
whats a poor gamer to do ???????

Why not check out the Xonar DX from Asus, they do EAX5 emulation.
You can get it below $90 now.
http://computers.pricegrabber.com/sound-cards/m/66000752/search=xonar dx/st=query/
Below is a quote from another thread by deruberhanyok

I get my info from Tech Report:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14500

From this I would call the DX and the XtremeMusic "even." Inconsequential frame rate differences with lower CPU utilization and equal, if not better overall results in Rightmark look to me like much more of an even match than one being better than the other.

Also from Bit-Tech:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/200...ss-soundcard/1

Looking at that I'd say the DX is superior to the XtremeGamer.

And there's ExtremeTech, where they have a Xonar DX and XtremeGamer in their article about the newest X-Fi:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2316939,00.asp

Where the DX again looks absolutely better than the XtremeGamer and even holds up well against the Super X-Fi 2 Titanium Ultra Extreme Champion Whatever they're calling them now.

With all of that taken into account I feel the answer comes down to brand preference. Because of all their recent bad publicity I think a lot of people are leaning away from Creative; after all they brought this on themselves when they were publicly called out for purposely crippling their Vista drivers.

In my opinion, wanting to avoid a company that purposely disables features - especially features that were paid for and were shown to work just fine in XP (and Vista with Daniel_K's drivers) - for no discernable reason other than to sell new products isn't really fangirlism, it's speaking with your wallet.