I never liked Creative, even if the hardware might be ok, their drivers have always been troublesome.
I dislike Creative too, Their cards are of high latency (the ones i've tried at least.) and are generally only ever as good as an average third party card.
I had a talk about EAX recently, EAX5? yeah sure, but EAX2 which can be found in many more places than just the latest creative devices, sounds just as darn good. So what if the reverb is calculated in a less realistic way, it still sounds good anyway!
Now, I had a turtle beach and the sound quality was WONDERFUL however, the card also has high latency. It would run at 2ms, but the hardware itself would introduce more latency for its effects and other stuff.
My new system, an EVGA Nvidia 680i board, manages 1MS!!! Latency where my old system managed 10ms. That's ONBOARD sound, realtek.
Does a wonderful job!
Sadly the best card I ever owned, an Aureon fun 7.1, wore out a month or so ago, plain card, high quality, low latency, but no longer supported. The memory chips/A>D converter got dodgy and all we got was noise on one channel :-(
If you can find one of these cards Evak, and are using XP (I am not sure there are vista drivers...) I would reccomend it.
Turt