sound

[Furunculus]

Asus Xonar cards.

awesome sound quality
good 3D game support
great windows AND linux support.

i have the posey version with the black shield, but the standard one sounds the same and costs half as much - £55.00

[Lemur]

Why is the Xonar card so much more expensive than a barebones Creative X-Fi? (Oh, look at all the bad reviews. Now I get it.)

-edit-

Sorry, forgot to address the other half of the question. I've never owned them, so I can't testify, but everyone seems have nice things to say about Logitech's speaker offerings, and they're on the cheaper end of the spectrum. Por ejemplo, here's a 2.1 system for $70 with overwhelmingly positive reviews.

If you're a real audio snob, however, the only solution at the low end of the price scale is headphones.

[Xiahou]

Onboard sound is the way of the true cheapskate.

For my part, I use an X-fi, (one of the good ones- not the cutrate ones) but I'm not really sure it was worth the money I spent on it.

[Lemur]

The X-man speaks truth. Onboard sound has gotten shockingly good lately, especially for simple stereo playback. I suspect that my laptop has nicer sound than my X-Fi on my desktop.

[Spino]

Unless your mobo sports an onboard dsp chip for processing audio I'd stick with a stand alone audio card. Most mobo chipsets only sport an audio codec, not a dsp processor, which means the audio processing/number crunching is being handled by the CPU. This won't affect your system performance if you only listen to music or use the basic sound settings in games but if you're a fan of 3D positional sounds in your gaming (especially EAX) then you really ought to invest in an audio card. In terms of sounds quality it's a matter of which codec your mobo sports. Some are much better than others in terms of sound quality.

As Lemur & Xiahou have mentioned, AVOID the X-Fi Extreme Audio card, it does not sport the onboard DSP chip which means despite the fact that it's a dedicated audio card your CPU will be doing all the work. Stick with the older X-Fi Music or X-Fi Fatality & Gamer cards, all of which feature the powerful DSP chip.

I had the excellent Turtle Beach Santa Cruz card for the longest time until I gave Creative's SoundBlaster Live! a try... huge mistake. What a crap card! I ran back into the arms of my Santa Cruz until a friend gave me his Soundblaster Audigy which was a great card for gaming and surprisingly enough, for music as well. I finally gave the X-Fi Music a go and have had no regrets, gaming with EAX enabled via a 4.1 speaker or headphones set-up is a truly awesome experience.

I'm a sucker for premo aural experience so it's my X-Fi Music for me.

[DukeKent]

I just added a Creative X-Fi sound card to my computer and lost sound. How can I update my sound settings without reloading everything. I have heavily modded my system and recreating it will take quite a while?

[DukeKent]

Found the problem and fixed it.