I bought my present PC in 2004, an eMachines W2785 that I've slowly turned into a Frankenbox with parts and upgrades from all sorts of makers. I'd never managed a successful and affordable upgrade from onboard sound to a sound card. I had an old Creative PCI 16 that I tried two years ago, but it lived up to the Internet horror stories of not playing nicely with my VIA chipset, even with the latest XP drivers.

Yesterday I spotted a Diamond Multimedia Xtreme 5.1 card at Staples for just $20. I bought it and put it in with fresh drivers. This thing sounds so much better than the onboard Realtek AC97 sound that it's not funny! A bit of tweaking of the included graphic equalizer and I am one very satisfied PC user. Clean, clear, detailed, glitch-free sound at last.

Reviews of the Xtreme say honestly that it's not a studio-quality card by any means, but hey, I noticed immediate and drastic improvement that pleases me immensely. No more onboard sound for me!

Tom

20 bills, oh hell yes!

Im going to have to troll staples, I need something halfway decent for music listening. I blew up my realtec card and have an older than dirt soundblaster.

Evan

I also have a realtek on my motherboard and in words, it bites the big one. As an alternate I tried a Turtle Beach Audio Advantage usb sound card. It is a great sounding little alternative to the onboard sound card without the tendency toward noise from computer operations. My only complaint is that when I am burning a DVD the sound card will not function properly. I assume that the burning process is just eating up too much resources. How does yours do when the CPU is very busy?

Since I added the PCI card, the sound is now completely pop, click, and glitch free. Heck, I used to hear pops and stutters just opening up Firefox. I also run the Folding@Home distributed computing program that regularly makes the CPU run at 100% for hours at a clip.

If you use a lot of CPU cycles when burning a DVD, something's wrong. You need to check if DMA (Direct Memory Access) is enabled on your hard drives and DVD burner. DMA bypasses your CPU and transfers data directly from the hard drive to your burner.

Start > Settings > Control Panel > System > Hardware Tab. Click on the Device Manager button, then the "+" sign at IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers to expand.

You should see Primary IDE Channel and Secondary IDE Channel. Ignore anything else. Right-click Primary IDE Channel, click Properties, then the Advanced tab. Look and see if Device 0 and Device 1 say "DMA if available", and at least "Ultra DMA mode 4". If either doesn't and you have two devices on the Primary channel, click the dropdown boxes to choose Ultra DMA mode 4, then OK.

Repeat this for the Secondary IDE Channel. You should have your DVD burner on this channel. Make sure that the Ultra DMA mode is at least "mode 2". If not, fix it, click OK, reboot if necessary.

This assumes that your hard drive with data that you are burning is on the Primary channel, and your DVD burner is on the Secondary channel. Never have the data drive and DVD burner on the same Primary or Secondary channel. That's a surefire recipe for failure, very slow burns, and sound card shutdown, because the data bus is filled with info that overrides sound.

Tom