SIIG SoundWave 5.1 PCI - sound card ( IC-510012 )

Although the sound card itself seems to work well enough, the software it's packaged with doesn't allow your music players to play 5.1 sound. When the company tech support ("Trung") is called (find them in an online phone book, he tells you that it won't play in anything except 2.1 unless you buy another $100 piece of software. So is it really cheap? Actually, after MANY hours researching on Google, I couldn't find any software that would do what they said, and they wouldn't recommend any particular program ... I was able to get Winamp to play in something close to 5.1 with their own internal settings (no center channel). Apparently, that's the only way to make this work. Every program, except Windows Media Player (that seems to work fine) needs to be individually tweaked. MusicMatch doesn't have the internals to make that happen and so it will only play in 2.1. A company selling a product, no matter how inexpensive, should not tell you that software is included and then later tell you that "the software doesn't allow you to have the board function at it's capacity. Try to find one that will..." --- Oh, and there's no port on the board to allow for a digital audio cable connection from your cd or dvd player. You must use analog. I'll have to now go out and buy a Creative product, they always come with good software, INCLUDED.

This card had poor software/drivers. While it did provide sound, it was barely usable as the card picked up a lot of internal noise (beeping and buzzing sounds). I ended up trashing it and purchased one that was only a little more expensive but much higher quality.

Unless you are really on a tight budget it's not worth your time.

If you are a musician and need hardware MIDI in a PCI slot complete with a 'game port' interface, then this card is for you.

I purchased this card earlier today and so far, so good. It's affordable, installation was quick and easy ( I'm no tech expert)and the sound quality is great. Another reason that I bought it is that it is backwards compatible with Win 98SE, unlike some of the other cards that I checked out.