I'll try to keep this brief.
I'm looking to buy a sound card to upgrade from my motherboard's integrated sound card. My problem is that I have no clue about what makes a good card or even what a good brand is. I have only heard of Creative Labs so I went to their website and saw 2 cards that caught my eye. The Sound Blaster Audigy SE and the Sound Blaster Live! 24 bit both for $30 (plus $8 shipping unless I can find it in a store). The Live! card I like the better simply because from the specs page it says it does more. I know that that is not the proper way to buy electrical equipment. Then I looked at a number of reviews for the card and it was all over the place. Some people said it had no issues while others claimed it had cracking and hissing sounds or wasn't even compatible with other PCI card configurations on their motherboard causing stability issues (They might have been talking about an older version of the Live! Card but I wasn't sure). The Audigy SE had better reviews and Newegg had a retail and OEM version of the card (and for some reason not known to me they even have different specs) for roughly the same price. I also read that some purchasers of these cards reported that the card slowed down their system which is something that I don't want at all. If these cards were to slow down my system would it be better to get a higher quality card like the $70 Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value, Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio , or the $80 Sound Blaster Audigy 4 (all plus $8 shipping unless I can find it in a store).
All I really want is a card that has mic in, great sound out (compared to integrated sound), and no hit against my system resources and preferably under $40.
Some basic system specs of my computer are:
1.4GHz AMD Athlon Processor
1280 MB of RAM
on an ABIT KV7 motherboard (I think. Trying to do this off memory is difficult)
Running Win XP Home SP2

I wouldn't normally bring a tech question here but I know there are a good number of tech people here and the forum that I go to for tech issues is down right now. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Well, allegedly the Audigy sounds better than the Live!, or so everybody said when the Audigy first came out. I'm not familiar with the Live! 24-bit. I came across a discussion of the Live! 24-bit vs. Audigy SE. Someone said that the Live! 24-bit does its mixing in software, using the computer's CPU (and incurring a performance hit), but the Audigy SE does its mixing in software as well.

A short Tech Report discussion of the two cards (and a few others) leads me to the belief that the two cards are practically identical for all intents and purposes.

But wait! If you get the one that's newer, the drivers may continue to be updated farther into the future (longer life cycle). But which one is newer? Well, comparing the two driver pages, the Live! 24-bit driver was last updated in August 2005, whereas the Audigy SE driver was last updated on April 2006.

So, the Audigy SE has newer drivers. My recommendation is to get that one.

Upgrading from onboard sound to just about any standalone Creative Labs soundcard will improve the sound quality dramatically. On the other hand, auditory differences between SoundBlasters may not be easily perceptible. When I upgraded the sound card in my mom's machine from a SoundBlaster 16 ISA to a SoundBlaster Live! PCI, it sounded exactly the same to me. Admittedly, the speakers were fairly cheap 2.0 Altec Lansings with full-range drivers...

As for your system resources, it should only hit them when you're playing games that need 3D audio positioning. Playing MP3s and the like uses almost no CPU time (maybe 6 seconds per 24 hours for Winamp?). Now admittedly the CPU usage might go up slightly when you're listening to 16 audio streams at once, but by and large Windows is pretty silent. All sound cards will use a percentage of your CPU time when doing 3D audio positioning, although how much they use varies by card.

Here's a comparison of the cpu utilization of two Creative's X-Fi cards vs. Realtek ALC880 and a card based on the VIA Envy24 chip. The X-Fis are hardware accelerated 3D sound, and the Realtek ALC880 / VIA Envy24 cards do it in software. In software mode, it comes down to the quality of the drivers, primarily.*

Beware! The X-Fi Xtreme Audio is a software-driven card, with the same component layout as the Audigy SE.

*-Realtek updates practically monthly; I was less impressed with VIA's drivers.

Go with either the Sound Blaster Live! 24 bit...
[url=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16829111003]Or this one...[url]
You have a budget.. so that one I just linked to is a decent card for a low price.
I assume you don't want something that can be linked to a subwoofer and shake the windows out of the panes..
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Thanks for the insight. I'm leaning toward the Audigy because it does seems to have more support. I think I'll sit on it for a few days though to see if it will be worth the price and the improvement of my machine.