I have to be honest and say that I used to think the sun shone from Creative's rear-end, as far as audio. Now I wouldn't touch one, at the prices they go for anyway. And I have found the nForce2 (Soundstorm) stuff to be more than adequate for gaming and general use.
SBLive! was fine until XP at which point they cynically decided not to properly support it, in an effort to make people get Audigy. I opted out at this point, since my on-board audio was a 5.1 surround setup, etc, etc and perfectly capable of handling basic gaming tasks / general use. It had a few annoying quirks but was actually far more stable and ultimately performed better than the Live! 5.1 I had... with SoundStorm I shall now not be bothering to get a standalone card until such time as a I seriously want to start with music recording/editing again.
