I work at a distributor of computer peripherials, we handle the X-fi and audigy cards, and I can't say that I've been blown away by any of them. The X-fi has a lot of converters, and is nice for surround/gaming/multimedia but for anything resembling professional audio work, you need something better. It will work, but with horrible latency, a lot of dropped samples, horrible drivers a lot of crashes, and for all that you pay twice what a entry leve pro card costs. I run AC97 along side my Terratec Producer Phase 22, it works perfectly, the only thing I had to work out was that the Phase needed it's own real IRQ, so I had to mess a bit with finding the correct PCI slot for it, since some of the PCI slots share IRQs. Then I had to switch the IRQ of the AC97 in the BIOS, it works great. Even WDM works in Sonar using both cards at the same time, and it's quite practical, ASIO is shit in Sonar, but rock solid in FL Studio.
Bottom line, creative makes great soundcards for regular multimedia, like playing games, movies, and your basic desktop needs, but for pro sound... well.. it's up to you, but I wouldn't. But that is entirely my own opinion.


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