I hate Creative cards for 2 reasons, one the whole crackling etc the second would be because of their insane and awful driver system requiring the CD to do things then giving new drivers on the site without version numbers etc and then if anything goes wrong you have to uninstall everything and start again with the full drivers from the CD... ugh. Installing some cheap 5.1 card in the other PC was a dream, just one standard driver download, no weird stuff and no screwed sound.

On that note, does anyone know of any 7.1 cards that support things like EAX3 or whatever? (not that EAX3/4 seem to work properly on my Audigy anyway).