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Sound Blaster X AE-5 Plus: Sound Card Review

Soundblaster, a name that PC users and enthusiasts have grown up with for years. Creative, the creator of the Soundblaster series of sound cards have been with us since 1981 and a worldwide leader in audio technologies. In 1989, they bought us the now famous and recognized name of Soundblaster. Since this time Creative have released a swathe of different audio products for the PC market, most notably the dedicated sound card. It was an easy choice back in the day, if you wanted quality sound for both game play and music alike, you purchased a dedicated sound card as it was most of the time far better than your onboard sound hardware. However is this the case now all these years later now that onboard sound hardware has vastly improved ? Today we are looking at the Soundblaster X AE-5 Plus, a dedicated sound card for the PC. Read on to see what we find.

The Asrock X570 Aqua Build

A build log featuring the exclusive Asrock X570 Aqua of which only 999 were made. I decided to change things up. I previously had a Threadripper 2990WX paired with an MSI MEG Creation X399 which I was not using to its full potential as a workhorse and found that more over it was being used for a mixed workload and gaming. The latter (Gaming) does not make sense on this type of CPU, and as I was not using the CPU in workload point of view often enough. What an expensive set of gear to have not doing what it is intended for ! So it was time to switch up and move over to Zen 2 with the Asrock Aqua X570 Aqua & AMD Ryzen 9 3950X.