yea... umm which soundcard has better performance? hehe... i was plannin on gettin a kick ass card but mah budget is 70 bucks..
kx

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Life is study...

Out of the two choices that you listed I would go with the Sound Blaster. The Monster sound card drivers dont work to good with the KT7,KT7-Raid mobos. You will have to download the Vortex driver for the Monster sound card to keep your system from crashing all the time if you go the Monster sound route. The Sound Blaster drivers work great with the KT7,KT7-Raid mobos. I know about the Monster sound card from first hand experiance.

Doesn't sound blaster live! boast less CPU usage? If that's the case, SB Live! would be better for performance, but in terms of price...that's another story.

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Not over the MX300. The MX400, on the other hand, I don't know. The MX300 typically beats the Live! by about 2% CPU usage difference.



That's the MX300 anyway. The MX400 is a different beast totally - It uses the ESS Canyon audio chipset, so it's not dependent at all on Aureal's Vortex drivers.
However, Diamond is all but gone, and I'd rather buy a card from a company that can supply me with driver updates. While Creative may update more frequently than Hillary Rosen of the RIAA admits that she's wrong, this much may be said: A company that still exists at least has the ability to write drivers, whereas one that does not doesn't stand a chance.

Stick with Creative...unfortunately. Maybe we'll see some good performance out of that new Philips Acoustic Edge card that's coming out. It's MSRP is $99...so you may be able to fit that in your budget if you look hard enough.

DAVE!!! Why don't we get our hands on one of those for a review, eh?

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"And knowing is half the battle!"

I don't know about the MX400 but I'm not too impressed with how the MX300 turned out. Sure, I have a pretty easy time locating sounds in games when I'm wearing headphones but the drivers are buggy and they gave up updating them 2 years ago. I'll readily admit that I don't know much about driver creation but it's hard to recommend a product after you buy something else from the company and they give up on it 2 months later.

I plan to get a Live! when/if I ever upgrade

Actually, Aureal developed in house WDM-certified drivers for the Vortex2 chipset, and the MX300 is near enough to reference design for them to work perfectly on the card.

I do agree with you on the aspect about driver updates, but I must say in *someone's* defense that neither Diamond nor Creative have a good track record for software updates. If you want to know more about Creative's troubles, just go to ANY of their product support newsgroups. The Savage4 (Which I own) went for six months with no driver upgrade from Creative, even though S3 had released new driver sets. Creative promised to have drivers ready in two weeks.

About eight or nine months later, Creative finally put out those drivers.
Let's not even get into how the Live! behaves with SMP systems...And I know the MX300 doesn't support it in Windows NT, but the Win2K drivers DO support SMP.

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"And knowing is half the battle!"