Dedicated headphone AMP
Upgradeble OPAMP, no soldering required, the stock OPAMAPs are worth upgrading.
Excellent sound
Excellent Analog signals
Lots of options available depending on your speaker set up
Weaknesses:
Win XP drivers are handicapped, only vista and 7 drivers are fully supported
Games not recognizing card, I suggest turning down hardware acceleration for those games.
Popping noise if not setting sample rate correctly.
You have to manually tweak for different applications. For music, set to best option available, for gaming, turn things to most basic. For normal use, set to 48 KHz. For normal ears being it shouldn't make a difference, but for my ears it makes a pretty big difference.
Summary:
This card is for people who have the patience and appreciation for the many intricate controls and tweaks avaiable. That is, it is good for audiophiles wishing to get the max out of this card. However, for gamers and average folks, this card might not be a good choice, infact it can be darn right frustrating. Auzentech is starting to ditch WinXP users. If you want the most out of this card, use it on vista and 7.
Bloated drivers
Not actually X-Fi
Non-existant customer service
Summary:
I bought this sound card back in March to use with my Beyerdynamic DT880 headphones. The sound quality was much better compared to the onboard chips, but since it's not a real X-Fi card, it doesn't support EAX 5.0 some newer games support. On my X58 board, the control panel took ages to appear and sometimes would hang on one of my 4 cores.
As of right now my card is defective. It has a continuous popping noise and Auzentech has taken a month so far to issue me an RMA.