Steamed joy ...

I wanted to compose myself a pure gaming PC, this includes then probably also a "Gaming Sound Card", I thought to myself, as the onboard solutions deliver to poor signal quality.
Also, I wanted to finally have all my music equipment on my laptop, so I am gaming PC etc. go out of the way any driver problems.

System: Windows 8 Professional, Soundblaster Driver Version: 6.0.102.23, July 10, 2013

The installation went smoothly, as did the driver installation. I then first tested the card with my ESI Studio Monitors as well with my TMA-1 Studio Headphones. It is noticeable that the sound card is not neutral sounds with default settings, but is very bassy. Well, not a studio but a gaming PC is supposed to be just ...

Signal quality is okay, unfortunately there are boxes for an ugly spike when turning on the PC and then again when the driver is initialized at boot time. Crack is unpleasant and quite avoidable (The Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6, which I take to make music that has not.)

The external sound module is a nice little bonus, that's all for me. The benefits could be quite extended. But maybe I'm spoiled by the Komplete 6.
At the sound module you can unfortunately only adjust the volume of the headphones, unfortunately not, the connected speakers, if you take does not use headphones. That would have been better resolved.
Equally incomprehensible why not incorporating a "mute" button for the microphone. So you are always "on air" and at quasi eg "TeamSpeak" forced to use Push To Talk.

Possibly I would have saved me a few surprises that I had previously researched better (volume control, for example).

Thus, the ZX is a nice sound card that is not 100% perfect, unfortunately. Therefore, there are 4 stars.

So far, the software is stable, no hangers or dropouts.