The Diamond XtremeSound 5.1 would have been a good card a year ago. With today's chipsets and the quality of on-board sound there is no reason to run this card, except to save a few CPU cycles. Their highlight was music playback, but other than that, the card just did not stand up to the HD on-board audio. There is still hope, with the inexpensive price tag on the XtremeSound 5.1 there are plenty of motherboards out there that are running older on-board sound options (AC97, ALC650, etc) that could benefit off loading sound duties to the XtremeSound 5.1.