They are pretty good, especially with the new drivers that allow dts and Dolby encoding. Wasn't dts supposed to be not possible with creative?!?. Anyway I was pleasantly surprised. It can do CMSS3D for the Audio stream encode to dts/dolby and then send it out which is great.

I haven't tried any games yet on it, still waiting for the graph card.

@Gurpartap there is no point to the prelude now. It is 2k bux more expensive for a start and also the dts support is not finished in its drivers yet (according to the last time I read). The only good thing is that the drivers are bloat free. The creative's drivers on download add up to a whooping 135MB, which on install grows to a lot more.

The only problem I have faced till now is that movies are not having the CMSS3D applied on them for some reason although music gets done fine. I think its a quirk of K-Lite Mega Codec pack. I will try and fix this. Also if you have the Dolby/dts encode on, then if you play a HD movie the sound card produces an annoyin sound, so for those you need to turn the encode off.

There is a crazy music creation mode for the drivers that has so many options that it drove me crazy. It allows you to control everything about the sound. I am in the office right now, will post some screenies from home.

Last thing is that this card is a PCI-ex card so that pesky PCI-ex 1x slot gets filled finally.