Home > Consumer Reviews > Philips PSC70217 2-Channel Sound Card

This sound card is working great in my AMD XP based system. I did not want to buy SB Live! because of incompatibility issues of this sound card with VIA chipset. SB Live! apparently changes PCI bus timing which causes issues with VIA chipset. So Creative is to be blammed for it. Sound card from Philips works on the other hand great with any hardware. It stinks that Philips does not want to write Windows XP drivers for this card but they are not the only ones. It is part of lifecycle in computer industry that some hardware becomes obsolete even though it is still functioning. It happened to my 200$ sound card. Company has been bought by Creative Labs and I have no drivers either for Win98 and up. Everybody knows that either Philips or Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound cards are least troublesome sound cards on the market now. This card has lower level of distortions than SB Live!. Sound quality is really good and noise level is very low. Another great option is TB Santa Cruz.

I bought a PSC702 card less than a year ago, new. Now I've upgraded my PC to XP and the Philips company line they'll never write XP drivers for the card, "because they no longer manufacture it". It seems the company has a lot to learn about the PC business. Don't buy anything from Philips unless you plan to stick to the same OS forewer.

I bought this card a year ago because I had problems with my SB live not working with microsoft game voice, which was required by my former Mechwarrior 4 gaming clan. It did everything I needed: 3D sound, on-line chat and a joy stick port. Then a month later I converted to XP Home and all hell broke loose. I tried the Win 2000 driver and it registered as "device is working normally" but did not. I then tried the PSC705 windows XP driver and got wave sound but no mic or joysick. I had to go back to my SB live which is almost dead. I recommend getting the SB audogy. All the others especially C-Media are incomplete and inadequete.