CREATIVESound Blaster PCIe Gaming Sound Card and DAC with Dolby Digital and DTS, Xamp Discrete Headphone Bi-amp, Up to 122dB SNR, RGB Lighting System, SB1740, Black

I was a little apprehensive about buying a Creative Soundcard in 2021, especially after hearing many horror stories of poor sound quality, popping sound, drivers going mad, etc.. But so far, this has been well worth it.Installed the card in my Z490 Motherboard, downloaded the Creative drivers for the card, nothing comes with the card in the box. The drivers were tiny by comparison to most drivers today, even smaller than my motherboard realtek drivers. They installed first time, reboot PC, and they worked first time.The sound quality is superb. I wasn't expecting much better than my motherboard's Realtek alc1220 chipset, but the quality was night and day better. First thing I noticed was the increased headphone power, they now really give my headphones a real kick, you can feel them vibrating on my head due to the far superior bass. I had to tweak the sound via Soundblaster command's EQ adjuster, but after that it blew me away.Games now have presence, and the clarity is superb. Bass is massively increased, as well as decent 5.1 sound. The Realtek alc1220 was a little flat sounding, no presence at all, although 5.1 was there it didn't feel true 5.1, it just sounded like sound coming from behind you, rather than sound coming from all around you. Games like the modern Doom reboot, Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Project Cars 2, etc..all sound amazing on my PC.And for looks, the RGB is actually nice and subtle, not in-your-face. Although this is for the on-board RGB, I haven't hooked up the external RGB strip that was included, it needs a spare molex power connector, and I don't have mine plugged into my PSU yet.Overall, a superb soundcard that, surprisingly, didn't cost that much - especially when you look at current GPU prices.

Definitely improved my computer's sound. Much more detail and tone in the music. Needless to say, needs decent speakers or headphones to get the best out of it. On YouTube, for example, you will notice how variable the qualities of the various recordings are.

First the good points:It’s easy to install, 1 thumb screw and a push into a pcie slot and it will work, the molex cable is only needed if you want the external RGB strip to work and I’ll come back to that later…The software is pretty straight forward, although I did need to reset my Z906 speakers before the surround sound would kick in properly. EQ options are great and it’s as easy as drawing a line to get the balance you want.Onboard RGB is nice if you like that sort of thing, it’s fairly subtle and again there’s plenty of options and if you don’t like it you can turn it off.Audio wise… Well that’s the main point of buying this isn’t it? It’s a noticeable improvement over my motherboards (Z790 Carbon) sound output, although you’re going to want to pair it with a good set of 5.1 speakers to get the most out of it. There’s also a selection of encoder option if you’re speaker set up uses S/PDIF and a profile selector that gives “better” options for gaming, movies and music output which you can fine tune to your preference. All in all I'm happy with the audio performance.Onto things I don’t like…The card has a weird bevelled edge that makes it constantly look like it’s not mounted straight in my case. This may be in part to my case being wall mounted and me looking up at it, if the card was below my eye line the bevel wouldn’t be visible which then brings about the question of why have it at all.The external RGB… Honestly not something that I wanted, if I was going full on RGB with my case I’d get a hub and do the job properly. The strip provided with the AE-5 is only about 2/3rds the width of my case so wouldn’t work well anyway. It’s also white which doesn’t look great with black cases and has black cables which will stand out in white cases. But none of that is a big issue as you can just not use it. However… For some reason on an all black sound card Soundblaster decided to mount the RGB connector on the facing edge of the card and make it white… End result is my black and grey build has a single white socket facing the windowed side (Or if you did use the RGB strip you’d have a cable coming out straight towards the window making it annoying to cable manage, plus you'd also need to run the molex cable) They could easily have mounted the socket on the side of the card out of view, provided a black cover cap for it or just made the socket match the rest of the card. Yeah it’s a small thing (1st world problems right?) but it could have been avoided or just not included to start with.So a great card slightly spoilt by the manufacturer adding the "sUPer coolz RgBz!" that really aren’t needed and don’t help the card do what you want it to do.

I was a fool I uninstalled this for months so that I could mount my GPU vertically – I just reconfigured this sound card and there is no comparison to ‘high end’ motherboard sound: the sound from this sound card is phenomenal, and it has a separate out for the sub, which is clear and separates properly from the speakers. Music stream audio quality is simply outstanding – this is a must have accessory for anyone who listens to music on speakers from a desktop PC; the quality of playback is night and day from onboard sound (even with a Sabre DAC)..

Bought this sound card as I have heard a lot of great things about it over many places, and I have to say I was skeptical at first due to some reviews here but oh man people must have been getting defective items as this sounds way better than the on-board audio, the crystalizer is great, and the surround is even better, previously wiht on-board audio my speakers were a bit on the bland-er side due to the board not seeing my subwoofer properly, but with this the bass is punchy and finally the subwoofer is doing its work, great product the drivers downloaded from the creative website were out of date as expected but there is an update with the Sound Blaster Command software that immediately prompted to update, updates were smooth a single restart only and boom it was working without issues. No complaints so far great sound as well as clear music the notes and sound effects are individually outstanding from each and every song I listen to, well worth it, 10/10 A little bit expensive but it is worth it as it will be a single purchase for many years to come.Possible issues after a couple days of usage buzzing noise under fullscreen software and fullscreen videos, driver reinstall did not fix, returned may try anothe model later on, but does sound great so do not let that discourage you.