Originally Posted by Chalex4
Not any more, they are/no longer will be trading in the UK. Existing cards can already be RMAd however, just you won't be able to buy them new.
When it comes to choosing a sound card it's mainly down to personal preference. I'm still very keen on my Creative Sound Blaster Extreme Gamer Failtality.
Using all the money you've saved above, you can grab the Sennheiser HD555 headphones. They go better with X-FI than Xonar, or so I'm told. I got them for xmas with a clip on mic and now I really know how crappy all my ~£50 headsets have been in the past.
X-Fi's go better with Sennheisers, Xonar's go better with Goldrings. Not sure what causes it, that just seems to be the general consensus.
Personally if I were to upgrade my soundcard, I'd go for the Xonar D2X or an Auzentech X-Fi Prelude.
Headphone wise, never tried HD555/HD595 however a good friend has HD595's paired with an X-Fi Xtreme Failtality (Top creative X-Fi) and says the combination is incredible. If you're going for the Xonar D2X, look at the Goldring DR150's or the Goldring NS1000's both are apparently very nice. Personally use the DR50's (Lower in the range to the DR150's) and they are very comfortable and give nice sound for music and very good positional audio in games.
Games favour clock-speed, applications favour latencies. (I've read that somewhere, however I strongly doubt if there's any massive noticeable difference visible, maybe a few seconds encoding/compiling time)
In terms of the OS I'll see how many copies I can get and give you a shout.
Hope that helps.
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