Creative Recon 3D PCIe sound card

Badde · January 4, 2013

I bought this sound card about a year ago as my first "real" sound card. Before, I used the standard Realtek onboard chip for years. I searched around and pretty much everyone (incl. Linus) on the internet told me to buy a real one because it really makes a difference. So I did some research and the Sound Blaster family of sound cards seemed to be a good choice, because of well regards throughout the years. I chose the latest model the Recon 3D to drive my 5.1 System and my headphones. Here are the pros and cons:

PRO

- Difference from onboard is almost day and night. Great for 5.1 and it really kicks my relatively cheap (also Creative) headphones.

- Possibilities to tweak the sounds, which gives the little bit of "something" to the music.

- "Scout mode" which is designed to help you hear enemies in games earlier and clearer.

- High power 600 Ohm headphone port at the back

- Reasonable price point

CONTRA

- Some weird driver behavior. (i.e. if you turn down the Volume completely, all tweaks you did to the single speakers are recessed to an even level)

- The driver dies (rarely and only in CoD so far) which resulted in a loud noise in the headphones where only a restart of the driver could help.

- Front panel audio doesn't really work, at least not for me. There are some weird clicking noises which weren't there before with the Realtek. But this doesn't really matter to me because of the more powerful headphone port at the back and easy switching from within the driver.

- Driver takes some time to launch on hard drives. (Since I have my SSD, it starts quickly)

- No 7.1 analog output

CONCLUSION

Would I recommend this product? Yes and no. If you l game a lot on your PC with headphones on, yes. Absolutely. If you want the ultimate home cinema experience this maybe is not the right thing for you. Linus recommends ASUS sound cards these days. Maybe you should also take a look at one of those.

Thank you for reading my first user review and sorry if there are some mistakes ;)

mozoa · January 20, 2013

Good review, I have the same card.

The front audio not working correctly might be just your unit since I have no problem at all, as well as the driver that has not yet failed me.

I got a OEM version though, no driver CD and such.

And that day the Creative site was having major problems on all sides. driver downloads took me a whopping 45 minutes.

Rekx · January 20, 2013

its not long ago i should deside of i wanted an dedicated sound from asus or creative but ended up not buying a soundcard at all because the reviews was so mixing and dumm sometimes :P but great review liked the simplicity of it.