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Nothing great about this card, it supports DDL and DTS, you can use only one at a time. Both DDL and Dts are supported by almost every single receiver out there.
Only supports 5.1 through digital outs (which is'nt a fault of theirs )

Buy the Diamond Monster Sound DDL or Turtle beach DDL instead . They're both the same card in different brand packaging. You don't have to pay extra for DTS encoding which you will never use if you have DDL already.

Movies come with their own DTS/DDL encoding so you don't need such cards for surround sound via digital ports. These are ONLY for playing games or music ( DDL/DTS pre-encoded tracks ONLY ) in surround via the DIGITAL port.

If you want movie/game surround out of analog ports (or) movie surround via digital ports any cheap card will do.

Anyone know of any good - up to date - articles discussing the separate card vs onboard effects? I know years ago I got a pretty good boost in performance out of my system by going to an add on card versus the supposed onboard (which provided outputs, but all the processing was software based, so it put a load on the system). My current system can handle the load easily (i7), but I want to understand what is and isn't being provided by current MB's that supposedly provide onboard sound.

uses the c-media chipset as the Xonar.. seems to have some good reviews on the egg.. which might mean nothing.. typically that drivel isn't worth trusting, but sometimes it can be.. I heard about issues with some games and the Xonar.. so buyer beware if you are getting this as a gaming card..

I currently have a 2.1 speaker setup. Is it worth getting a card for this setup? Would there be a significant difference between a addon card and onboard card?

#5, any decent add-on card will sound better than integrated audio, but if your 2.1 speaker set isn't very good you may not hear much if any difference (difference is most easily heard listening with good headphones). For 2.1 output, this is excessively priced.

The overhead of hardware vs soft-processed audio in games isn't significant today, CPUs with multiple cores have plenty of performance to spare, if you're that close to an unplayable or jerky framerate it won't make enough of a difference which audio solution you're using. However, differences in which sounds, not just high fidelity output do exist.

If thinking about gaming then Creative is unfortunately still the best brand.

My only concern is the driver support for this. Anyone know if they make a good set of drivers that don't cause bugs with Vista x64 like Creative does?

i need a good sound card for singing karaoke thru my HTPC. any suggestions? having controls for echo would be a plus.