Best soundcard? & When is M2 coming?

[Enverex]

Two questions, the first and main one is what soundcard do people recommend getting at the moment or soon if there is anything decent on the horizon? One catch, I don't want anything to do with Creative, so nothing made by them.

Second, I'm a little out of the loop so I'm not sure if it's actually been announced yet but I wanted to upgrade sometime "soon" because I'm currently on a 754 processor with a motherboard that isn't even mine, but I didn't want to upgrade to 939 if M2 is coming out not long from now as this upgrade will have to last me quite some time. Issue is I will likely have to upgrade the graphics card as well as the RAM, Proc and motherboard, so I will have some time to save anyway.

[RavenNight]

Why nothing to do with creative, they make fantastic, easily available sound cards? My X-Fi is superb!

[Enverex]

Just.... trust me. Nothing to do with Creative.

[Xaneden]

Generally speaking Ravenight, professional music peeps never go with Creative, though I agree with you that the new X-Fi range is Enverex's best bet.

[Enverex]

Sorry, It's just I've been through like 4 different creative products and frankly I can't stand them. Their driver system is a nightmare, I can't stand their business practices of limiting hardware via drivers, I've had the "rice crispies" experience with them and basically I've had enough and want to go with someone else. The sound card will be for music, games and videos, I don't tend to do "that" much gaming anymore.

[DeludedGuy]

Fair enough, but I can highly recommend thier new X-Fi range, its superb.

[Enverex]

... did Creative start sponsoring Hexus while I was away? Christ, heh.

Ok, not another word about Creative.

[Applecrusher]

Onboard sound these days is all you should need for just music, games and video...

[fredered]

ALthough be carefull, a couple of the msi 939 boards have creative chips for the onbaord sound
A mate has a terratec [probably misspelt] card which is quite good, but they tend to be expensive

[sawyen]

Terratech stuff are pretty decent tbh.. Them Aureon range supports 5.1, I have one in the office and their quality is no worse than that of Creative's..

[Thorsson]

Yeah I hate Creative too, but for what you want the only alternative is onboard TBH. Creative/onboard has driven everything else except muso cards off the market.

[Enverex]

Ah, forgot one thing, I need 7.1 support, heh. Another reason I didn't want to go for the X-Fi is that it looks horribly expensive, and after paying a premium for the last Creative card I bought and it being, well, ****, I'm kinda reluctant to do it. Plus I feel like I'm paying them to screw me.

[Lu-tze]

Hercules fortissimo uses a VIA chip and supports 8 channels for around £45. Not as good as Creative though, but good value.

EDIT - As for M2, the information seems somewhat vague at the moment. Original release was Q1, then apparently it would be delayed to Q2, and now rumours are that they will bring it out early. The thing to bear in mind is that the early processors will be quite high range, with lower range to follow. And as with all platform releases, motherboards will probably take a while to come in, BIOS's are less refined, and CPUs are hard to get hold of.

[csi_grissom]

every creative card ive used has been better and better i never found a card as good and that worked so easy in new builds, i guess we all have bad experiences, im currently using audigy 2 and sounds the bomb, soon as the new cards come down in price ill upgrade again.....

[iranu]

Don't forget that M2 will be DDR2 (iirc) which is more expensive atm.

[Enverex]

The card I'm currently using is an original Audigy and the card has been pants and the drivers nothing but nightmares, hence my distaste for the Audigy range. Also notice that Battlefield 2 won't let you enable EAX4 on anything other than the X-Fi, despite cards as old as the Audigy 1 support it? Lame...