I need a new sound card

[Superhuman]

Ok so I'm using an Audigy 2 ZS right now in the system in my sig and I'm suffering from the infamous bug where your microphone won't work if you have more than 4gb of memory installed in your system. It's unfortunate because besides that one very annoying issue I absolutely love the sound card. However, I need to be able to use a mic so I can chat on Vent and such.

So I need something that does 5.1 and has comparable sound quality to the Audigy 2 ZS. Doesn't matter if it's PCI or PCI-x1, I can accommodate either.

I've been looking at the Asus Xonar series of cards, but I'm reading a lot of reviews where people complain about having to manually set their speaker configuration to speakers instead of headphones (even if they don't have headphones plugged in) every time they boot their computer. I don't want to deal with bullshit like that. I just want something that fucking works out of the box. And it would be nice if I didn't have to spend more than $50.

Any help/recommendations/user experiences are greatly appreciated.

 

[OFaceSIG]

Depending on how much you want to spend these are the parts I would recommend in order of cost:

Asus Xonar DG (requires a free PCI slot)
Asus Xonar DGX
Sound Blaster Recon3d base model
X-fi Titanium HD

 

[Impulse]

Not sure I'd put the Recon on the same list as the rest... No complaints about my Xonar's drivers tho, haven't really noticed what it does when I reboot tho as I rarely reboot and I'm always switching between headphones and speakers anyway.

 

[jime]

I love my Asus Xonar DX PCIe, now I don't have to unplug my headphones to listen through my speakers.
It's a little over $50 though, but remember, you get what you pay for. I got it on sale for $79 awhile back and couldn't be happier. No problems with the drivers and Windows 7 64bit.

jime

 

[gamerk2]

Just about anything on the market will thrash an old Audigy 2. Easiest to recommend option is the ASUS Xonar D1/DX, simply due to its features/price.