Creative Sound Blaster OEM 16 PCI Sound Card ( 3000473000003 )

List Price: $31.55 Discount Price: $294.77

Features:

• Device Type - Sound card
• Interface Type - PCI
• Localization - English / United States

Customer Reviews:

Garbage. [Posted on 2006-12-16]
Product came with no documentation whatsoever, no installation CD. Attempted to install this on 2 computers. "plug and play" install did not work. downloaded the appropriate drivers from Soundblaster and informed me that NO soundblaster card was found on my PC. attempted to contact vendor,no email was available, only a long distance phone number. Threw it in the trash.

Good Audio, better than on-board sound....Ideal for running DOS-games. [Posted on 2007-12-14]
I bought this for a older computer, to run older DOS games with Sound Blaster. It works excellently in that regard, it runs all my older games(like Descent, Duke Nukem 2 ect.)it also has more crisp sound than my on-board motherboard sound. It also is excellent for using a MIDI keyboard, as the waveset sounds very cool.

Its quite aged now though, so obviously its not as good has some of Creative's newer models. But overall it works pretty well for a basic computer setup. I have it currently installed in my new P4, still way better than that of my motherboard.

If you want a good card for newer gaming though, buy a Sound Blaster X-FI.

Bare Bones [Posted on 2008-07-24]
The drivers for this card are indeed hard to find and install. Creative has so many different variants of their drivers that it took many different attempts to locate the right ones. Windows XP Professional did not install this card as plug-and-play, so my only option was to hunt down the drivers. In the end I found the right ones, but it was a lot of work. For those not driver savvy avoid this card for sure.

The most disappointing part of this story is the performance. It does fine for most basic sound generation on my 2.0Ghz Pentium 4 system (YouTube clips, system sounds, etc), but I suspect that it is a weak link in MP3/AAC playback in iTunes. Music played back in iTunes skips and stumbles frequently making it unbearable to listen to. Upgrading to the latest Windows XP service pack, iTunes version, and Quicktime along with DirectX 10 did not alleviate the problem. I have never experienced this problem on any system with XP installed, including systems with far lower processor and memory specs. This leads me to conclude that the sound card is not keeping up (maybe its still a driver issue).

In the end the cheap price will only be a true bargin if you are really willing to spend the time to hunt down the drivers, and you only need basic sound on your computer. You get what you pay for here for sure.

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