Quote Originally Posted by Jun aka Pekto View Post
OT
If it's just sound quality, I don't have good-enough ears to tell the difference between it and my Audigy 2 Value. As far as causing any instability or other problems. Mine has none to speak of except occasionally doing the "skipping record" thing on BF2's main menu. That's the sole reason why I have an Audigy 2 Value installed. That was under Win XP. That problem's not present with BF2 under Vista RC1 which is why the Creative card is disabled in Vista RC1. The Realtek's doing just fine.

Via on the other hand, has had a track record of unstable and quirky motherboards especially with the KT266 and KT266A series. I lost an Abit and a Soyo KT266A boards after 2-3 years while an older AMD760 board outlasted both and still works great in my wife's pc. The Abit simply died for no reason. The Soyo (Dragon+) lasted 3 years. So long as no cards were installed except an agp video card, it was great. But put anything on the last 3 pci slots and that board becomes very unstable. Granted, that quirkiness may not apply to other Via-based components like the Envy soundcard or the Firewire chip of my current pc. But, I learned to take the name Via with caution.
The VIA based chipsets are one thing, their Envy sound chipsets are another. Audiophiles love those cards - and they're cheap. The only thing they lack compared to the Creative cards are the hardware 3D stuff.

As for the Realtek, it's not really during the casual browing the net while listening to music where I'm having problems. It's during gaming. Certain games just have issues with the Realtek (clicks, pops, "underwater" sound, etc.), forcing me to turn off 3D audio or turn on software sound emulation or whatever. But then again I can live with that, because I hardly have the time to game much anymore.