Is the Audigy 2 ZS the best Sound Card for Windows 98? 

Man I can believe it. The Audigy 2 ZS changed everything for me when I got one used. The sound was so much better in Counter-Strike 1.6 that it almost felt like I was cheating when I was playing in Competitions. Good video as always Phil!

Yeah, I have an Audigy 2 (non-zs) and even that is amazing for 98. Better still, as long as you can physically install it, you could use this card in Windows 10, because of the Daniel K drivers.

Glad you finally reviewed this card! It really is a nice card. I've even got mine running in parallel with an Aureal Vortex 2 card and switching between them has been surprisingly painless. The upside of this setup is that the Aureal Vortex 2 can be used for DOS games whereas the Audigy 2 ZS cannot, if I recall correctly. Tomb Raider is a good use case. You can also use this card for wave table shenanigans, even though it's a little more work than an AWE64 since you have to load the soundfont manually. I did find one use case for WDM drivers, by the way. Diablo II will not allow you to enable all of its 3D sound effects without the WDM driver. I stumbled across this by accident when I did a 98SE/XP dual boot. Eventually I made the connection that XP only supports WDM, so I switched the 98SE configuration to WDM drivers and I saw the options appear. Not sure if keeping it in WDM mode has any side effects aside from the performance/stability tradeoff. Oh, and if anyone has any more details or corrections to these statements, please add them and I'll be sure to give it a test.

You da man Phil. Thanks for the bonus video. I love both the X-Fi and Audigy series cards. I like the SB0250 hub/panel that you can use with the Audigy cards, too.

Thank you for the wonderful video. I've used the Creative sound cards for years with very little trouble. I never realized how fortunate I was listening to some of these others experiences.

I've been using the Audigy 2 ZS for a year or two now in my Windows 98 SE boxes. They are the retail versions (not OEM) and work excellent with everything I've thrown at them. They coexist just fine with my other ISA sound cards - as long as those are not initialized in Windows. (I have to keep the drivers for those from loading. But the hardware itself is still found by DOS games.)

I have 22 years old sound blaster live and its working for windows 10 😅

Used this card a lot during the Windows XP days for that sweet EAX sound in games, didn't know it was also good for Win 98, good video ^_^

I use with a 5.25" panel. Excellent sound card.

I love the A2 ZS. The gold adds at least 4-5 bits to the audio lol.

I'll never bore of retro sound or graphics cards. Look at those babies!

I'm still using an Audigy 2 ZS on Windows 11. I just love it, and I use the EMU chipset for MIDI synthesis, loading both an XG soundfont and an MT32 soundfont.

I got this card with a Creative THX speaker system back in 2003. The sound was awesome! As the mobos dropped PCI I packed it away (the card), and still used the sound system. Unfortunately it was a 6.1 setup, so I always lost my center speaker. Glad to hear the Audigy 2 ZS can work with Windows 10, I'm building a retro AMD rig and it has a PCI slot on it. Maybe I'll download the drivers and see what happens!

Every time Phil says, "Hey Guys!" I reply back, "Hey Phil!"

I have an aureal vortex and a Audigy 2ZS in my windows 98 machine. A3D 2.0 is really neat in the few games that support it, but I use the Audigy much more often because the quality of the sound output is just so clean.

Tuesday bonus video! What a treat!

SPDIF is the most important thing on a pc :D I always use my Stereo Amplifier which powers my HiFi tower speakers and has another low level output for my active subwoofer aswell as the lovely digital input to connect my pc. This way everything sounds great even with junk onboard audio.

Thanks Phil! This card was exactly my choice when going for a Pentium III retro system. Mainly because of the possibility to use the case front audio header with an adapter connected to that white header on the card. Worked perfectly for me because I used a modern case.

Bought this sound card with a BFG Nvidia 5500 agp card to play Battlefield 2 for many, many hours. A lot of great memories in those days.

These were such great cards though the driver installation could be frustrating. I picked up several of these years ago from a local used computer store for a few dollars a piece. I've used several different SB Live! and Audigy (1) cards over the years and the quality from the Audigy 2 ZS has been noticeably better.

Hmm from what I can remember. The Audigy 1 SB0090 was the essential Win98 audio card from Creative and the Vortex 2 from Aureal during 1998-2000. I remember retail stores pushing the Audigy 2 ZS as the premiere card for WinXP. I’ve kept my original Audigy 1 Platinum eX with the black breakout box in the same Pentium III 533EB since 2000. The sound quality and EAX production within games is still spectacular.

Hi Phil. First of all, thanks for another GREAT video! Keep up the great work! I also have this sound card in one of my rigs (P4 Prescott, 2GB DDR-400, Radeon X850XT 256MB, 80GB HDD, Windows Me/XP SP3) and it's audio quality is just amazing! On my "pure" Windows 98/2000 rig (PIII 550, BX440, Radeon 7500 AIW 64MB, 256MB PC-133) I decided to go with a Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum EX instead, and definitely any Audigy sounds much better than any Live!. For DOS compatibility I have a Diamond Monster Sound MX-200 on the same machine.

I think you should also have also include a review of the DOS drivers with that audigy 2zs card?

Picked up one for 15€. Works well enough on my Athlon 64 2ghz 98 machine, especially with a Vortex 2 SQ2500 also installed. Those sound cards and an nvidia geforce Ti 4200 just make the perfect 98 machine for me

I would take a Vortex 2 any day of the week over any Creative Labs card.

Prior to watching this video I thought to myself "Great, maybe Phil tells me if the Audigy2 can support VXD drivers" and alas you didn't fail to deliver that info :-) Thanks for not missing any technical detail !

i have an audigy 2 (model sb0240) and thats been working really well for me. bought it for the cd spdif and it is indeed a lot better than the normal cable in my case (both useses of the word case).

Not sure about 98, but it's easy to install this without all the bloatware in XP. Insert the driver CD, then open device manager and right click on the audio device under Unknown Devices. Tell Windows to look in the Audio/Drivers directory on the CD and then select Creative Audio WDM. You can do the same thing for the Unknown PCI Input Device, which is actually the Creative Gameport (header only). This puts only the drivers on the system, no splash screen at system boot, no utilities, no AutoUpdate nonsense, none of it, and it takes about two minutes including reboots.

I have two Audigy 2 ZS cards, both marked as SB0350 and look identical as far as I can tell BUT one has all black connectors and one has colored connectors, a mix of green and white. Using the drivers from Vogons, the ZS2 card with the green and white connectors will not be detected. AFAIK it worked in an XP PC. I'd say, if you plan on getting one off ebay, make sure to get one with all black connectors. Maybe its just my card, maybe not, but there are plenty of both on ebay with no price difference. Also, if you want a 15-pin joystick port you need to find a bracket with a 15-pin port and ribbon cable. The connector on the card is the 15-pin connector labeled Joystick (duh) under the word Audigy. Most listings don't include one but you can find them sold separately (some at a ridiculous price) or maybe you have one that came with an old motherboard.

I have AOpen AK73 PRO socket A motheboard, I'm in the beginning of building my retro WIN 98 system. Your channel is perfect for my project.

I can confirm that this card works in win 10! You just gotta play with the drivers a bit ;)

I have the same card, found one a few years back for a nice price even after having my first Live! I'm looking after a front panel for this one, already have one for the Live SB0060 and another for the Audigy 1 SB0160 but I read that they are not interchangeable with later models. Now I want to test it in '98 after seeing this video!!!

I have an Audigy 2, I've had it since new, I bought it because it had ASIO drivers and I like to make music, not that I ever used it for that as it wasn't really much use for music production as it lacked decent inputs and outputs, so I bought a Tascam US-122 USB sound card, which incidentally I still use to this day on my Win 10 machine. Tascam haven't supported the US-122 since Windows XP, they did have a stab at a Vista driver which was pretty bad, but It just so happens that windows compatibility mode work a treat with the US-122. I bought a set of Roland studio monitors along with the Tascam, and they are still going great, they have basically sat in the same place on the window sill where I put them they day I bought them in 2003, and have been used with every build I have had since then. I like this set up as it has a big volume control on the US-122 so I can change the volume easily if a game gets loud at night or some such, but I digress. What I was going to say is what is the difference between the ZS and the normal Audigy 2? I read somewhere that the ZS has dolby, but is that it? I am using my old Audigy 2 in my Win XP build, so it gets used on a daily basis after having sat in a draw for years, I use the Daniel_K drivers which is a tip I picked up from you, so thanks for that.

Correct me if I'm wrong everyone However, I have a Windows 98 build and I picked up this exact model off ebay and on the back it has 3 white stickers this indicates that it is a Dell OEM Audigy 2 zs. There is ZERO indication anywhere on the card that this is the case except a post I found on Vogons. So I tried to download the proper CD for this and it says that the device is not detected and it would not install the drivers. So I went back to vogons and they have a work around, you can't use the setup but there are about 11 steps or so to get it working and I did! To confirm that Phil has a single white sticker easy to install version I see that at 3:16 I am correct. Back to Ebay to purchase a single white sticker version to complete this build!

I recently acquired this for my XP machine to test out, it turns out it’s working for 98 SE , ME, and 2000 too. I’m sure it’s pretty good for some DOS games as well.

Today I got the joy of using your video to help a fellow gamer 🙂

That white connector you skipped worked on my Dell 4600 for front panel audio. It was a drop in replacement for the fake SB Live I was using. I am disappointed the Live and Audigy do not have standard FP audio connectors. This card is such a great card for both Windows 98 and XP in a dual boot configuration. You can also dig up some working SB Live DOS drivers that work with patch. Good video Phil

I used this sound card! I still have it in its original box in my closet!

Nice video Phil !! I tend to agree with this, although I also like YAMAHA YMF-724 and 744 cards thanks to their drivers :)

I love this card SO much! I have multiple versions of it including the external Platinum Pro to go with my MIDI tower stack. I would get the PCMCIA version as well, but I have no older laptops to use it in.

On winxp try this with the kx driver, it opens the whole card up to you. On my p4 machine I used it for audio production with latency of 2ms.

I'm using this card on my main Win98 Socket 370 machine, aside from having to switch to the VxD drivers (WDM was causing stuttering in games) I didn't have any issues with the installation or use with this.

Excited to try it out and that Expendablrs game looks super fun, my duron 1.4GHz, 512MB Ram, 9800 Pro, WD raptor is ready.

I actually ran this card in my Windows 98 rig, and the drivers were an absolute nightmare. First-party, third-party, didn't matter; just getting the damn thing to work, even temporarily, ended up eating more time than the games I played with it. Dropped it for a Diamond Monster MX300, and I couldn't be happier! Granted, the Audigy 2 ZS cost me $5 compared to the MX300's $60, but the seamless driver experience and (awesome!) A3D were totally worth it.

Misc fact: the ZS is one of two audio cards compatible with SGI Fuel and Tezro workstations, the other being the Revolution 7.1. Have to say though having compared them, I do think the Rev 7.1 is way better, but maybe they behave differently in a PC, hard to say. Hmm, can the 7.1 be used with Win98? I have loads of them but have only ever advertised them for SGIs.

thanks man, I was having stutter sound and it worked, ahhh the pretty windows 98 startup sound!

Just got the Audigy 2 ZS and those that are curious it can be made to work with the DOS drivers from the audigy 1. If you get the drivers off vogons they wont installl unless they detect a vxd driver. I did that installed them and copied the dos drivers files to another location. I could only get the WDM drivers to work in Win98. But the dos drivers do still work. I also used a patch program by a vogons user that claim to make audigy 1 drivers work for 2. Both SB16, FM, MIDI (8mb font) worked and without the noise I experienced with the live 5.1. I also want to say this was in pure dos mode. It would make sense to zip up the dos drivers in a zip to save others time.

I don't know about windows 98 but this thing sounds beastly on windows 10. better than the onboard sound using the same settings.

I remember this. I had SB Live! 1024. The WDM drivers halved performance on my Athlon 950 and removed SB16 DOS support under Win. VxD drivers were fast but also a massive BSOD Eldorado :D

Awesome Bonus Video! I love Creative sound cards! I had a SoundBlaster 16 3D, a SoundBlaster Live! MP3+, the Audigy 2 ZS, and now the SoundBlaster Zx... I use them for games, multimedia editing, music and movies... The combination of price and quality is great! The drivers are a problem always, yes. But each one was (and are) a blast to have, use and enjoy.

The one that had sound fonts.. that thing with the bass up can do some really interesting effects in midi

the Audigy 2 ZS Gold (gold-plated connectors) is the best PCI add-in sound card for use on nForce machines specifically, but it's amazing you can still get daniel_k drivers for that which go up all the way up to win10 x64. You should consider trying this in a PCI slot on a bonus video with those drivers and see how well they work. considering it's a card designed and manufactured around 2003, it's wonderful they still work here, 17 years later in 2020 on newerish hardware with the latest win10 builds.

Thanks for the videos! I would love to see a video about the best ISA soundcard.

Phil, if you’re using the card’s SPDIF out to record audio, aren’t you skipping the card’s own DAC in favor of your recorder’s? In other words, to what extent are you recording the true Audigy sound as opposed to the digital processing of the Audigy combined with the analog processing of your recorder? That’s assuming there’s an analog stage at your recorder. If not, then the DAC stage is happening at the viewer’s end, so in this case, my phone. Great video, though!

Great cards for dual-boot systems. I have a Windows 98/XP gaming rig, and the card works perfectly in both modes.

EAX with this card in Diablo 2 is mind blowing, just try to enter a dungeon and listen to the water drops in the background 🤩 Dear Phil (my favourite ms-dos/win98 youtuber) did you film this one over few days or something? As you did repeat your self with exact same info, about drivers, dx9 and so on, only positive critic/question😁😁🤗

I haven't checked if this is the same model, but I have one of those cards. I use it for my Windows XP and it sounds amazing! it does have problems running games that have MIDI for some reason, but I'm sure that the CD installation could fix that.

Haha, my Audigy 2 ZS still lives. My motherboard audio went bad a few years ago so I tossed in my old Audigy, and after fumbling with drivers, it's what my headphones are plugged into today.

Audigy 2 sounds great in DOS as well (audigy12 patch). The sound quality in Epic Pinball, Jazz Jackrabbit, Pinball Fantasies and other games with SB16 support is the best I've heard in DOS. General MIDI sounds quite good as well (with the 8MB synth), but Adlib emulation is rather bad (same as SB Live!).

Not just for Win98, I'd use my Audigy2 ZS even with my Ryzen 5 2600 gaming PC if this would have a PCI slot. Gotta go with SB Z :)

I miss those days of sound cards which look so badass. I use an old c-media pci chip with a bridge chip to make it compatible with pci-e. It just works.

I picked up one of those recently in a bulk lot of XP era components, now just holding it for the right build to use it in. I'd miss the gameport as I have a collection of 90s PC joysticks, though it does appear the card has a header for a gameport, so I just need to find the right cable.

The link for the audigy drivers in the video description is dead. I also checked out the Audigy category on your webpage, but I am not sure if this is actually an Audigy 2 driver. Doesnt seem like it and I also dont get the card running. Also tried the driver at the vogons though without much success. Not sure if my card is just faulty.

I have a 2ZS running under windows 10. It sounds good, but I find it picks up too much computer noise. I do have the outboard box and that resolves the issue. I used the optical ins and outs to go to my high end hifi.

I had a sound blaster live 5.1 back in the early 2000s the sound was incredible for the time.

The Audigy 2 ZS and the X-Fi PCI cards both work fine in windows-10, and the drivers for 1909 are on creative labs website, you need to search for them. If you have no sound, then you dont have the correct drivers installed. Try the Audigy RX driver search for ( SBA5_PCDRV_L11_3_01_0056B for windows 10 1809-1909) , that works fine and if you have ( SB X-FI, then look for SBXF_PCDRV_L11_2_30_0012 )

A suggestion for a video: running an Audigy 2 ZS and a Vortex 2 and the proper way to get A3D to work properly in such a setup. I actually learned how in a thread on Vogons you replied in. You could reply here how to or save it for a future video. It be worth to show the difference between the fake A3D from Creative and the real A3D from the Vortex and maybe EAX from the Vortex and Audigy. It is simple enough to switch between cards with both installed.

Hmm I have all 3 of those cards, excellent video

Seeing the interface of Windows 98 again makes me feel young again. I miss that UI.

Lol when he was showing the audigy 2 ZS, I was like "hey, that's my first sound card", then we put the xfi titanium and i was like "hey, that's my second (and current) sound card".

Was literally just listening to New Frontier before clicking on this video and check out 5:58. Funny coincidence.

Love your videos Sir!

How come this guy doesn't have 1 millions subscribers already 🥺 In my country the ' Zero Knowledge shit holes' have it. Life is just not fair. Keep doing good work man we all love you and you will be more successful then all these shitty tech RU-vidrs. ♥️🍻

Awesome card indeed. Using one in my XP machine ;)

Really good card. I' am working on a project with Sempron Mobile 3300+ for Windows 98 and early XP games, I tried this card but I stuggled with drivers. I wonder if this sound card support some MS-DOS MIDI games too. I´ll try again, thanks to this video

Black and Gold and High-End components? Sounds like Terratec for me

Wow I use one on windows 10 still. Great card

I love these cards they have a'lot of compatibility sadly i have the audigy 1 windows 10 seems not to support them often or u need a custom driver

I'm listening to this via Audigy 2 ZS, right now (2023) ..THANK YOU good OL' Daniel_K ♥ YUP! There is/was a few AM4 motherboards with "legacy PCI".

we can't wait 100k subs.

Great video as always. That PCI-E x-fi at the start looks pretty bad though, those output ports make it look like it's been in the ocean for a while.

Now you tell me. I went hunting a while back for an Aureal Vortex 2 on eBay, but I just remembered I already had an Audigy 2 ZS in an old PC that my mate gave me!

I have the PCMCIA version of this card in use on an old Alienware laptop running XP. Pretty awesome cards for their age.

why no Vortex for A3D?

This is an extremely good card for the price! You can get it for like 10 bucks used, and it is many times better than the sound on the most expensive motherboards. The lower DB noise at around 106 makes it sound better than many of the onboard ones. Higher DB is a marketings trick that only works, when you also at the same time use better parts and couple better power to the card. Which onboard sound most time, does not, yes the newer more expensive onboard chips with like 120db is more clear in sound, but also sound more FAKE with music, most of the time. Just a pity that it is not compatible with the newer ports and OS.

Pretty sure that digital out carries S/PDIF data from memory. So, in theory, you could plug it into anything that takes S/PDIF via TOSlink or RCA and have surround sound output. I've never seen a 3.5mm S/PDIF adapter or anything though.

I still have mine. I bought it to use its FireWire port for video capture.

My socket 775 retro XP machine uses this card too. I think I had a few that I put in my other socket 775 systems.

Hey Phil, you're doing it wrong. Download the cd image onto your second drive, unpack the iso onto your primary hard drive. DO NOT INSTALL YET. Reboot, when it finds the hardware, point the install at the folder where you unzipped the iso to and things will install faster. This also works when you run into the win98 bug where win98 can't see the drivers you're trying to install.

The thing about my Windows '98 build is I use it to play both Windows and DOS games, so to try a card like this I would need to know if it works well with DOS stuff too (I assume it doesn't?). I remember struggling with even getting the SB Live working with DOS stuff in Windows '98 despite it explicitly supporting it, even going so far as to try different model numbers. I ended up switching to one of those AOpen AW744L cards you recommended in a video a while back and it's been good, supporting both DOS and Windows stuff. *EDIT: Oh yeah, for XP (and even Windows 7), I can vouch for your recommendation of X-Fi cards. I have one of the larger "Xtreme Gamer" editions and it sounds incredible. I honestly think it has a much more even and naturally crisp sound than the ZX series cards I use in my modern machines, which seem very bass-heavy even with all software EQ disabled. I wish I could still use it in my main current day desktop, but the cards I have are PCI only.

About the 10kx sound cards like the live series or the audigy series, you have to know that the hwardware is limited to just 48khz most of the times, i have seen a lot of driver implementations just using the sound card at 48khz all the time and then just adjusting the pitch and the playback/recording speed to make different sampling rates to sound right when played back at 48khz, but more specific drivers implementations can have sampling rates supported in hardware and so having a way better quality and usage of some card's features, and so in this reguard crerative drivers are the best, and linux and mac drivers makes use of the pitch trick for a lot of cards, except for e-mu e-dps cards (which i invite you to try since are quite cheap now) which are better supported thanks of their fpga's firmware was completely reverse engeneered

I had an audigy 1... platinum? I think it was? with the drive bay connector and such. And it currently sits in my ultimate 98 machine. My lower end 98 machine has an aureal vortex 2

I get a "windows protection error" after installing the drivers cd. I dont know what to do! :(

I had no idea the Audigy 2 series was even compatible with Windows 98... I knew some of the first Audigy line were, but this is good news

I still have this.. of course there are no more drivers but it still works

I just bought a Audigy 2 ZS last week for about 10usd, great value! because the on-board sound card of the Abit-AI7 has gone, this one is perfect, easy to install. But i realise I have to "clear cmos" so that it could be detected by windows device manager, then install the driver.

I got it on my Win98 Rocket Machine. It's the best.

I was so caught in their ecosystem. I started with the SB 16. Then it seemed like every couple months I went to Best Buy during lunch break, I see some new creative sound card. And I would buy it. Did this for like 6-years. Not even sure what the last card I bought was? A shame really. RealTek onboard and more importantly HDMI based audio has really killed the need.

It is great for XP and 7 x64 with native drivers. Creative ASIO driver finally works properly on 2ZS unlike Audigy 2.

what a great video! you know what would be a another great follow-up video? how to get the ZS working in DOS. pretty plz phil