I'm not sure about that. There's a large number of us completely sick of creatives bull. I bought a card less than 2 years ago, and the driver release for vista has only the console, no eq, no cal, no stereo surround, I need to use alchemy to get EAX aswell.

I'm fairly sure you've never heard EAX, because you have to have alchemy installed, and add games manually to use EAX in vista.

The xonar STX destroys the forte in terms of hardware, layout, components, DAC, amp section and overall sound quality from a good bit of reading I have done.

Go ask head-fi! (They might be a little crazy)

So EAX aside when considering the use of alchemy in vista, the forte doesn't have much going for it. It will be unsuppourted in a year or two, and that's a huge, lame dealbreaker to me.