My Creative X-Fi Platinum died, and I can't stand Realtek onboard.

I'm looking for one at most for $100 or so. I use 5.1 Trittons and 5.1 Logitech Z-5500 via analog (green/orange/black cables).

 

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Could try Asus Xonar cards.

 

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It'll probably be down to another Creative X-Fi or an ASUS Xonar.

The deciding factor will be on how important EAX is to you.

Creative created EAX and their cards have hardware EAX acceleration.

Xonar has some EAX software emulation.


I hate Creative, but I do like the EAX sound effects in some games. So I'm still using a Creative card.

That depends on OS. If you are on Win7 its software no matter as direct access to audio is locked out.

 

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Hardware accelerated Direct Sound was disabled with Vista/7. But OpenAl still supports hardware acceleration and it seems most of my EAX games support this.

I had to use Alchemy to get EAX working on few of my games.

 

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My main problem is that the Realtek sounds like complete crap. I have very little bass compared to my Creative card, even with +10db on room correction and +6db natural boost. Never payed attention to EAX, and always had it disabled.

 

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Alchemy uses OpenAL. That is usually what I have to use for my EAX games too. My understanding is that should be hardware accelerated EAX though.

Older motherboard? Usually find the Realtek onboard sounds pretty decent and has plenty of bass. My problem is usually some hiss with the onboard sound at higher volumes that drives me crazy.


Either way, sounds like if you don't care about EAX and want something that sounds good. An ASUS Xonar DX is what you might want.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829132006

I find the Creative Audigy cards are still very good and don't have the problems that some of the X-Fi cards have. They're very cheap in the UK too, no idea what the pricing is in the US.