Creative 70SB150000000 Sound Card

Gaming with the Sound Blaster Z is truly a spectacular experience.

The Sound Blaster Z is an ideal all-round solution for your PC gaming and entertainment needs. It comes complete with the Sound Blaster Beamforming Microphone for crystal clear voice communication. The beamforming mic allows me to play without a head set, and still get excellent sound quality and the ability to hear everything going on around me (with the proper speaker set up) the Mic can be used even with your volume up, it does an excellent job of canceling out the sounds coming from the speaker and provides nearly zero feedback, in every case so far with team speak push to talk even during loud BF3 gun fire, I have yet to have a complaint about feedback or echoing

THAT is the number one reason why I recommend this card/software that's included, no more do I need to have ear fatigue from wharing a large headset and pressing on your ears for a long time. its great PLUS you get true surround and can hear other things around you.

I will not bore you with tech specs since a simple Google can help you there. BUT I will provide a link:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829102048

And as for the first negative review, that is an idiot who didn't know what he was doing and with crappy hardware , instillation couldn't be simpler:

Install card, IF on an existing build (mine was on a fresh build (several days after the thing was already online) MAYBE you MIGHT need to uninstall your existing audio drivers, however I never needed to.

then game on

if you do have an issue just uninstall all Audio drivers, then reboot then install from the disk, I have not had Any issues and couldn't be happier (had in operation for over a month.

I Ordered This SoundCard as soon as it was available on Newegg. It had been listed for about a week but was shown as being Out of Stock. Newegg Used OnTrac to ship this item and got it to me today.



At first glance, The packaging appears to be nice, But if you look closer, you can see that the window on the Card's Cover is clouded by what appears to be the Fake Felt that is used on the internal packaging which has rubbed off and flown around inside the box.




Here we can see they did indeed use some sort of spray-on or other type of fake felt on the internal packaging. The card is secured to the packaging by 3 wire ties.



Creative must not have anticipated vibration inside the packaging. The felt particles that rubbed off the packaging have coated the card Inside and out. Luckily, this gave me a reason to remove the shroud.



Here we see the PCB of the card with the shroud and PCI Slot bracket removed.
The Audio input/output jacks are all gold-plated and are grounded to the PCI bracket. Overall construction of the PCB and the audio jacks appears very solid.



There isnt much to the rear of the PCB, however you can see there are two tiny screws which hold the "Sound Core3D" cover over the actual audio processor. The cover appears to be plastic and therefore serves no thermal purpose.



The card looks better now that i have cleaned all the felt particles off of it, On to installation:




Installed the card, Booted my PC up without issue. Windows automatically detected the new device and installed standard HD audio drivers for it. I then popped the CD in the drive and installed the software, which took about 3 minutes. After a quick reboot i was back at my desktop without any installation issues.

I then Launched my zune software without configuring the software (which was a slight mistake)
At first it sounded better but i could tell something was not quite right. The software defaults to 5.1 channel audio when first installed, so if you only have stereo speakers, Switch it asap.
Even then, the software does require some fine tuning that will depend on your speaker configuration.

I found that while the SBX Pro Studio Enhancements do help, it's defaults were too high for me.
I knew beforehand that this might be the case, as with my Previous XtremeGamer card the "crystalization" feature's default is too high and can create unwanted volume level fluctuations. I lowered the sliders until i found an acceptable level for myself:

The arrows represent the default values on the sliders.

Overall sound quality is improved even without the use of the SBX pro Studio enhancement, but music is much more crisp and detailed when i have it enabled at this setting. So far i am definitely liking this soundcard, hopefully i will be able to add more to this review as i use the card more.