Customer Reviews

RF-51SDCD-5-1-Channel-PCI-Sound-Card

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

While this cheap audio works just fine I failed to notice one tiny gotcha when I purchased it: the optical output (S/PDIF) only outputs a stereo field (2 channels).

After spending a couple hours trying to figure out why my surround receiver wasn't playing all 5.1 channels I finally noticed the bullet point on the item description, "Optical out Supports stereo S/PDIF out and pass-through of multichannel DVD sound". So in order to listen to all the channels I need to, instead of running one optical cable, run several 1/8" to RCA style cables.

This is not a deal breaker, it's just something I wish I had been aware of before I bought the Rocketfish sound card.

I purchased this card for under $10. Saw mixed reviews, but for the price I figured it was worth the gamble. Received it with in a week. Opened the package, and saw the backplate was a little bent. Not sure if that was due to shipping but anyway, I bent it back into shape. Stuck it in my computer running windows 7 x64. Windows update came up, installed the driver and it worked. Didn't have to finagle with anything. Sound quality is amazing. My on board sound has 7.1 surround sound, but it doesn't sound any where near as good as this sound card. I'd recommend this product. A+ for simple installation and fast delivery. Kudos to everything except that back plate being a little bent.

I purchased this card when my on-board sound failed and I needed a quick cheap replacement. It covers the basic functions but in certain applications the sound would suddenly become distorted with static and popping and the only way to fix it would be to either go into the menus and temporarily disable 3D sound or restart the computer. Also this card has no ASIO support and will give you latency problems and choke on complex or dense MIDI compositions in Cubase. If you're not composing music or playing games with 3D sound, this will be fine but you will want something better if you're doing anything more than watching Hulu or playing Farmville.

I bought this about a year ago because I wanted to do some sound processing and wanted to protect my motherboard and on-board sound. I think they were having a sale and it was $10 at Best Buy. I would have given it 4/5 stars up to a week ago, which is when I started playing starcraft 2 games, and the sound would cut out, followed by a computer crash.

Originally, I did not suspect the sound card. It really was a strange bug, because my computer had worked fine all through the campaign. And even though it was the sound that was cutting out, I thought maybe my 2 GB of RAM or old video card wasn't cutting it in multiplayer. However, after examining a few crash reports, and BSODs where the problem was that some component was accessing memory it shouldn't be (Page fault in non-paged area), I began to suspect the sound card. When I re-installed the driver, I discovered that it wasn't windows logo signed. This was a big tipoff. After disabling the sound card and plugging my sound back into on-board sound, the game stopped crashing. I have now removed the sound card.

I usually don't review things I don't buy on Amazon, but this isn't so much a hardware complaint, so it applies to all people.

Conclusions I would make:
1) One of the cheapest sound cards around
2) Fine for most people, most situations
3) Don't buy this for intensive gaming or if you may be pushing your memory/PF Usage close to the limit.

Few ppl said this didn't work for for them but i got it to work for me i just a few minutes.. I got my dts surround movies playing for my pc in 5.1 not stereo..Yes.. 5.1 sound in my htpc is nice now that its coming from my pc and not just my blu-ray player.. i would recommend this to any one on a cheap budget.. It works.. 100%

Sound quality is good though not of studio quality. reduced 1 star for the sound distortion when viewing you tube videos to full screen. I had better sound with my 2.1 usb sound card.

I am using this just for video chats and I am okay. If you are looking at, just the same low end sound I recommend, if you need high end then go for some thing better.

Easy to install, I let windows install the drivers instead of using the cd and it is working good and for 12$ shipped I cant complain!

Worked great! Had a virus on Win xp home, and after reinstall, sound drivers wouldn't load correctly. Installed this in empty slot, even though other sound was built in on the board. Worked fine. Recognized both, I only installed driver that came on CD, and left other device alone and and everything worked fine! Highly recommend for inexpensive sound card! CD came with it worked great and didn't have to download anything.

Card works fine for passing DTS and DD through the optical port. Not much else to say, it was a good deal, costing me about $5 shipped. I would highly recommend that you use the install disk for drivers as the download from Rocketfish's website kept failing during install because it refered to a damn .pdf that isn't included in the download.

Installed on Windows 7 Service Pack 1 64 bit. Windows identified the card, automatically downloaded and installed the drivers, and also installed the Rocketfish Audio Control Panel into the Programs menu. I used this to set the card to 5.1 mode and everything was done within 5 minutes. Sounds fine and for $5 you can't go wrong.