been looking at various internal and external soundcards for my pc, looking to upgrade onto a 5.1 system so what would be the better option?

 

What are you going to be using it for, media playback, recording or gaming? Personally, I'd go with an internal PCI card from M-Audio, something like the Revolution 5.1 or 7.1 should satisfy your needs. Avoid Creative if you can, they are both evil as a company and use relatively poor quality components.

 

they seem to have got the market sewn up, why do you think they are evil as a company? Just wondering

 

In the past Creative have charged people to download drivers if they lost the original media, their driver packages used to contain all sorts of crap you didn't need, they sued Aureal and ran them out of business then bought all the IP and sat on it, the original Live! series cards upsampled everything to 48KHz and there's nothing you could do about it, their psuedo-surround EAX API isn't true positional sound despite the fact they they own the patents to impliment a proper solution, the situation surrounding Creative's deal to get EAX into the DOOM 3 engine "sucks" according to John Carmack.

Here's a nice article on the state of the PC consumer soundcard industry.

Of course, all is IMHO

 

gonna be using it for gaming and media playback, also any suggestions of a decent 5.1 system looking for around 100 for one

 

personally id get an internl one for neatness.
Ive just got rid of my audigy2 6.1 and am now using 5.1 onboard motherboard sound.
(usd to get crackling in games down to those stupid creative drivers)

to be honest I cant tell **** all difference in sound quality.
Myself id just get a nice cheap one like this for 17 quid:
Seems to have got reasonable reviews

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=85533

 

class a, cheers for that made an interesting read

and yes it annoys me that driver disks aren't available

while reading it i was looking at my platinum 2 card.......

What do you think of the new X-Fi then.....

ill get my coat