AOpen Cobra AW850 Sound Card

Pros: Cheap but excellent sound, easy installation, loaded with I/O features, useful bundled software
Cons: no digital CD-in interface, only analog

My computer (using ASUS P4P800-Deluxe motherboard) has a built-in sound card with an outstanding 5.1-channel audio system. So why do I need a PCI sound card? Well, my desktop PC has multi-boot operating systems. On it, I have Windows operating systems ...

Pros: Excellent analog connectivity, supported under many OSs, above average performance.
Cons: Nothing else you could expect at this price!

The AOpen Cobra AW850 is a PCI sound card based on C-Media's CMI8738LX chip. It features: 1) 5.1 channel analog audio output via stereo mini-jacks 2) Driver support under many variants of the Microsoft Windows operating system 3) Driver support under ...

Pros: configures all five ports to different sound setups
Cons: no S/PDIF input

When I discovered the joys of a subwoofer, combined with my love for electronic music, a friend at school offered me his old 5.1-channel surround sound system for $50. The receiver box that came with the system provided audio input for both 2-channel ster ...

Pros: Cheap, easy to install and sounds great on a 2.1 speaker system.
Cons: None for a non-gaming rig.

The wife gets the hand-me-downs whenever I upgrade my computer. Right now she has my old speakers 2.1 Logitech speakers. The creative sound card on my wife’s computer stopped working after 6 years. She doesn’t play video games or watch movies on the computer all she wanted was to listen to music. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a sound card for her and I am very happy with my current sound card, no reason to upgrade, so I was looking for a cheap replacement for her computer.

The AW-850 Deluxe set me back $20 and I feel that was a steal. The card installed easily on Windows 2000. The wife was listening to great sounding music in no time.

If you are looking for a cheap replacement sound card this is the way to go.