the Creative Audigy SE - Performance

Now we are doing the tech talk. Let’s take a good look at how the card performs. I will start with the pros and advantages, the good side of the card, and finish with the parts where improvements are necessary (or at least desirable).

The card has zero compatibility issues. It runs great on virtually any PCI slot motherboard. Absolutely no drawbacks could be sensed regardless of the choice of operating system. It works great on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and even Linux. Summing this up, Creative developed sophisticated driver support.

The first thought after upgrading from your motherboard card will be: Why have I waited so long? After just a few minutes, you can hear crisper music alongside deeper bass. The HD sound is worth every cent. The overall sound is much, much clearer. The analog quality is just supreme compared to the on-board counterparts. The sound is really good and the low noise level is appreciated also.

Bass management (Bass Boost) is easy, and you aren’t required to visit the Control Panel. It’s just a click away and located right on the Taskbar. Other technologies offered by this card include the Smart Volume Management, Audio Clean-Up, and so forth. The smart volume management is very helpful if you have many audios at different sound levels.

Especially for older people, the higher volume level and the possibility to boost certain frequencies offers greater pleasure when listening to music or other audio through the computer. Of course, these functions also benefit everyone. If you are struggling to hear quality sounds when using headphones with your current on-board audio chipset, then it’s definitely a good idea to get this card. The sound level will increase and the sound will be clearer and of a higher quality.

The CMSS-3D Audio Technology does its job wonderfully and the surround effect can be sensed even in headphones, not to mention when you have a nice 5.1 or 7.1 audio system. Music sounds completely different on this card compared to on-board audio; in my case, that was the AC 97. The sound is crystal clear. You just need five minutes to convince yourself that this was a great deal.

We've arrived at the place where Creative excels the most—gaming. EAX brings your gaming experience to another level. The 24 bit audio and EAX 3.0 support is a must-have if you want to be the best and the fastest. Now you can hear someone sneaking up on you in a first person shooter or ambushing you from behind; you are going to hear the sound you should perceive in any game, so to speak. You feel like you are in the game, due to the professional 3D positional audio. The games will simply come alive and the atmosphere generated by a game will reach new borders.

The power of the 24 bit audio can be sensed on music and voice recordings too. But you shouldn't forget that for a good sound recording, a good setup is also necessary. A more elaborate article about this can be found here. For movies the sound quality also increases, especially if you have a good 5.1 or 7.1 audio system.

But enough said; it sounds too good, doesn't it? You may ask what negative aspects it has. First, it is the bloated software package, but hey, we aren't restricted to it. We can still continue to use the classics, such as Winamp, Foobar, BSPlayer, KMPlayer, or perhaps, if you will, the Windows Media Player. However, there are few Input/Output ports, as we can see on the picture below. If we consider the fact that this is a budget audio card, however, and anything that has more ports is priced double, if not even more, then we can overlook this absence.



It also has only the EAX 3.0 support, instead of the fanciest EAX 4.0. Hence, we will not get the latest technology for the latest games. Maybe now we are asking too much for the $30 that we paid for the card.

Also, we can comment here that the card doesn't offer an on-board processor (hardware acceleration), meaning the CPU of your computer will continue to “feed” our sound card with preprocessed data. This issue can be neglected if we look at the low price of the card, not to mention that for today’s powerful systems this is no problem at all. Either way, if you have a decent system, it won't grant your CPU significant relief.