With the new drivers, realtek, you can't adjust anything, you can only pick out of the handful of effect names, like hall, room, stadium, etc.
With the old school drivers you could make your own config.

Just a guess...
Perhaps the x-fi drivers have a better stock effect config.
Maybe that's the diffrence you guys are hearing.
That's what I'm thinking.

Not that it is a gimick or bs.
That would be a real inprovement actually.

I hate the new realtek drivers.
The control panel sucks and you can't change a darn thing, you can only pick form preset effect configs and they all suck.

I might try this x-fi driver for the realtek's out later on for my dfi 790fx.
Some time or another I'll try it out.
At the moment though, my current system uses a via chip, the asus crosshair 4.
Supposedly it can use the x-fi driver's or cpl, but I haven't beeen able to figuer that out yet.

Win7's built in effect config for the speaker out is slightly better then the default realtek cpl stuff.
Bass boost (lowers other freq db's though to make the boost).
Loudness eq, but that is only useful for crappy audio tracks that are pre-mixed to low.
Not much..., but better then nothing.