Earlier this month I ordered a used Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi card with a Fatal1ty front panel thingie from eBay, after my motherboard's sound chip started acting weird. I just got the new card and all that today. So far, so good, though I haven't had a chance yet (because I need to get two plug adapters so my headset's two plugs will fit in the larger jacks on the front panel) to see if the front panel works well or not. I did notice, though, that plugging the power cable in from the PSU was a bit hard to do and the plug just seemed to fall off at one point, suggesting that either the plug or the jack it's supposed to plug into is either worn out or poorly built. Given the age (10+ years) of the setup I got, I'm going to say that the jack is probably worn out.

Still, I can jury rig something to keep it plugged in if worse comes to worst, and if the different jacks work, all the better.

The card itself is an old PCI interface X-Fi, model number SB0250, I think. The front panel uses all PATA connectors, including a long PATA data cable that brings me some nostalgia.

The sound quality is fairly good so far, though technically speaking it's inferior to the Realtek chip on the mobo with a maximum 96KHz output (the Realtek had a much higher output quality), but it's still 24-bit which is something I look for in sound cards, so that's a plus at the very least.

I'm still getting used to the Creative Audio Panel, it's a lot different from the old Realtek HD Audio Control Panel I used to use. But like I said, so far so good. Everything seems to be working as it should be.