When we last looked at the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 (the Platinum Ex, June 2003) we were highly impressed by the soundcard and its many functions, but felt that there was perhaps too much on offer, leaving you with many unwanted, unused and unwarranted inclusions.

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The Creative Sound Blaster Live! Platinum 5.1 is the latest sound card from Creative Labs, the company that has dominated the consumer-level computer audio card market for most of the last decade.

Big, brash and versatile, but for top-end PCs only. Enthusiasts will love it.

The new revised S-Series Platinum S150 puts up a convincing case against Tomtom's One, with a bigger screen and other tricks.

A decent board, but the Hybrid SLI feature doesn’t justify the high asking price

All the options you could want, although it’s pricey

Think of sound cards and chances are you're probably thinking of Creative. Thanks to its phenomenally successful Sound Blaster line of cards, Creative is easily the leader of consumer PC audio. The Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum Ex is the latest in this range, and is by far the most feature rich. The question is do you need most of these features?

The original Audigy brought ASIO drivers, SB1394 (IEEE 1394) and EAX Advanced HD to the masses, but it was criticised because some people felt betrayed by the 24-bit 96kHz specification, which referred to the DACs rather than the sampling rate.

Creative has enjoyed a long reign as the driving force in consumer-grade PC audio for the better part of a decade.

Creative has raised the stakes again with the Audigy, this time from 16- to 24-bit sampling.

The fish-eye effect combined with substandard audio and poor software makes the Swann one to avoid.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

Redmond 'gets' The Apache Way.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

Unfortunately, Sparkle's 6800GT was the only card available for this Labs, and we can't compare this apples to apples with the rest of the cards in the pack. But, we couldn't let it go untested so we compared this to the rest of the field for each benchmark, which gives an indication of its advantage over the other cards through both synthetic and real-world tests.

The X800XT PE is ATI's flagship technology, and its main change over the standard X800 XT is a core frequency increase from 500MHz to 520MHz, and a memory increase from 500MHz to 560MHz. Consequently, it performs better than the standard X800 XT's, topping all the benchmarks and achieving a phenomenal 26588 marks in 3DMark01 in 1024 x 768.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

While this Spanish anti-virus program is hardly a household name in Australia at present, it is gaining in popularity through its availability on the internet. Its low cost (around $78) and plentiful features have been a strong selling point for people looking for something a little less expensive than the popular Norton or Trend Micro products.

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