Home > Consumer Reviews > Creative Labs DI5630 Modem Blaster Flash 56K Modem

When it comes to computer peripherals at this price, it's tempting to ask not how well it works, but does it work at all. Well, it won't intercept your emails while the PC's off, or grab faxes for you, or page you when an email arrives, but if you want those things you're in completely the wrong price-range. In reallity, I found setting this modem up to be very simple and straight forward, though I can see how the complete novice may get a little confused, and it has so far been a solid performer giving good connection speeds without sacrificing accuracy. My neighbour uses a $200 modem, and gets precisely the average 48 KBPS connection speeds that I get on this little budget gem. I'm not going into design features and build quality and all the other things you may be interested in if you were spending silly money, and as for reliability, well mine hasn't flinched in 2 years, so if it blows tomorrow I'll consider I had my money's worth. Capable and reliable this is a great choice for the budget conscious.

I've assembled a few dozen "budget" systems over the last few years and the one thing that always bothered me is how difficult it is to find a good quality modem at a low end system price. I'm usually thrilled to get 42-46kbps in my area. I recently had to buy a modem in a hurry at a chain store to finish up a machine and it happened to be the DI5630. I have to say that I'm impressed. I've been using the PCI version and over the last few months it's never connected at less than 48kbps. I've read some of the reviews about difficulties with the PnP feature of this card but have never come across this problem using the Win98 OS on any of the PCs I've built since then. I think this modem is about the best you can get for the money, and until I break down and get cable or DSL, this is the last modem I'm going to buy for myself.

I bought this for a friend for Christmas, and I just installed it today. It works wonderfully. I had no problem with the pnp features; Win 98 detected it right away. Driver installation was no problem, and it connected at 52,000. This modem is an excellent buy. I gave it 4 stars because the fax software has no manual, and I'm still trying to figure it out. For this price, get this modem.

Modem is a bit flaky and setup was time consuming. Not true PNP which didn't help-had to setup manually. Regardless of how clean the line is, modem rarely come close to maximum bps rating. Considering USR comparison based on recommendations from other users.

This modem is a fairly old model, I have had it for 3 years. I love this modem. I took it out of the box poped it in, started my computer and connected to the internet with no problems. At this time I am planning to replace my modem due to IRQ problems on my PC, I have decided to get an external modem from the same company. I am puchasing the Digicom\Creative DE5620 model. I have chosen this because of my success with this modem company.