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Creative Sound Blaster Recon3D PCIe Amazon $60.50 Delivered.

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These retail for around $100 locally. Dunno if it's a good sound card or worth an upgrade from onboard audio but the price has dropped hard at Amazon. PC audio guru's more knowledgeable than me can discuss below if it's a bargain for onboard sound upgrade or not.

Sound card has a built in amplifier, up to 600ohms so folks here with high end headphones might appreciate this cheap upgrade.

Windows 8 supported as well. Cheapest it has been according to Camelcamelcamel.

Specs:

24-bit Analog-to-Digital conversion of analog inputs (up to 96 kHz sample rate)
24-bit Digital-to-Analog conversion of digital sources (up to 96 kHz sample rate to analog outputs)
16-bit to 24-bit recording sampling rates: 8,11.025,16, 22.05, 24, 32, 44.1, 48 and 96kHz

Connectivity:

Line In / Microphone In: Shared 1/8" mini jack
Headphone: 1 x 1/8" mini jack
Speaker Out: 3x 1/8" mini jacks
Optical Out: TOSLINK
Optical In: TOSLINK

Speaker Support:

Stereo/2.1 Speakers
5.1 Speakers
Headphones

Bus Connection:

PCI Express 1x

Minimum System Requirements:

Intel® Core™ 2 Duo or AMD® equivalent processor, 2.2 GHz or faster
Intel, AMD® or 100% compatible motherboard
Microsoft® Windows® 7 (32/64-bit)
1GB RAM
600MB of free hard disk space
Available PCI Express® (x1, x4 or x16) slot
Available CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive

Link to Official Page: http://au.store.creative.com/sound-blaster/sound-blaster-rec…

Price History at C CamelCamelCamel.

Related Stores

Amazon US
Amazon US

closed Comments

  • +2

    Blaster from the past!

    • sweet, this will go well with my ISA SCSI card and 5 1/4" floppy

  • +3

    people still buy sound cards?

    • That's my thought.crept for professional sound guys.r these going to b much better than the 7.1 onboard that has optional optical out?

    • +2

      Yes, otherwise we'd go crazy with all the 'hissing', that almost all on-board sound solutions produce.

      • seriously? my motherboard soundcard has no such hissing. but then again, im no sound pro.

    • They do if you have headphones worth more than your ibuds.

      • ibuds? i dont use no ibuds. just speakers, like i said im not a sound fanatic. so what would i know. Picture quality is more my thing. :)

        • Makes a huge difference when you can hear static through the canalphones.

  • +1

    Cheapest on staticice is $99 plus delivery. Now its sound quality…

  • Is this Creative's current flagship sound card? Does it replace the X-fi range?

    I have some grudges against Creative for dropping driver support for older cards when a new OS releases and forcing people to buy new cards if they want to upgrade their OS.

    After that debacle, I switched to using on board audio. Right now I have an ASUS Xonar DG. It sounds just like my on board audio… but was only $31.

    • Not even close to flagship. RRP for their flagship cards is ~$300. The X-fi is Creative's range for music and movies. The Recon3D's are their gaming cards, but have recently been replaced by the Soundblaster Z series.

      I have an ASUS Xonar DG too. The headphone amplifier is great. pretty much on par with the Recon3D.

      • Were you able to get your front headphone ports connected to your DG? I couldn't. I tried both plugs and get no sound to the front.

  • These are useful for people using N36L/N40L microservers as HTPCs, and who's setup doesnt allow for HDMI audio to be used (like mine). Since the N36L/N40L only has 1 x PCIx16 and 1 x PCIx1 and the PCIx16 is always taken up by a video card, it leaves a relatively uncommon PCIx1 slot for the soundcard.

    I use a Xonar DX card at the moment but this one would do the job at around $40AUD less.

    Obviously if your amp has HDMI audio passthrough and/or you are going directly to your TV and farming the audio out from there this is a complete waste as the HDMI audio comes on pretty much every video card.

    • Many of us use GFX cards that allow HDMI audio, obviating the need for a discrete sound card.

      [edit] I just read your comment properly, you've already covered this…sorry. Time for me to go to bed… ;)

    • +1

      true, but this looks like a full height card hence it won't fit in a hp micro server

      • You are completely correct. I'm going to make like StewBalls, and go to bed.

        • You two fools going to bed… you do that and you might miss out on a killer (but short lived) deal like I did. (Went to bed 6AM, an hour before the PS Vita sale on Amazon).

          You snooze you lose.

        • +2

          A true OzBargainer has an alarm powered by the RSS feed so he/she gets woken up by new deals.

        • lol… that would be worst than the first 4 months of a newborn…. mmm no thanks!

      • Worse than that, even if you had a full-height slot, it would be wasted on this.

        Better to use a USB dongle. The boxes on ebay are a bit bigger, but could be hidden in a spare HDD slot and use the internal USB socket. For an HTPC, it is all digital passthrough, so the audiophiles can't rant about sound quality.

        Anybody know a deal on floppy controller cards? I want better quality than the integrated ones.

  • I'm not knocking the deal.. last one I bought was +$200
    I used to be a big creative fan until.. they dropped support in Aust.. then driver support.. what next..
    I understand this is through amazon, but is there anywhere for warranty repairs in Australia??

    • I can't recall ever warrantying a sound card, over the past ~25 years (owned my own PC store from 1997-2003). Even the shitty $20 cards don't normally fail, unless a cheap'n'nasty PSU blows up, or your system gets zapped by a surge, etc.

      • +2

        I have seen faulty sound cards at a large distributor I worked at. They were rare though. CPUs were also rare, but not as rare as sound cards. Mind you, this was back when there was no such thing as on board audio.

        HDDs on the other hand came in dozens a day (close to 100).

        • Yeah, you could always pick the lemons. Back then, the original IBM 'Deathstar', and any Mitsubishi (Diamond) optical drive was very bad. So bad, that I refused to sell them, and the cheap case/PSU combo's.

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