Which PCI sound cards for Dell D/Docking station??

Does anyone know which creative sound cards that fit in Dells
D/Docking station for the m90 and m1710? In the manual there
a short mention that the cards are limited to "half-sized/short"
versions. The D/Docking station I am talking about is:
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=310-8112

Any opinions on the usefullness of a docking station like this for the
m90 and m1710?

On another note, are USB based sound solutions worth considering,
or are these inferior/cpu demanding?

Thanks,
SFR

 

I'd say no to the USB just based on my experiene with ATI USB Wonder.

The PCMIA or whatever sounds cards are pretty good. I know people who use them for live events.

 

Well, except that the m90 and m1710 don't have pcmcia, so you're stuck with USB, PCI-in-dock or firewire.

 

It all depends very much what you want to do with it...

Record music, make music, play music, game, watch DVDs...

 

Maybe Expresscard then? Whatever the expansion slot is would be preferable to USB2.

 

Yes, that would be great. There are no expresscard sound cards yet, unfortunately.

 

Some of the OpenGL visualizations I develop include positional audio (OpenAL) and I would like to be able to connect my laptop to surround systems like my Klipsch 5.1 speaker set. Other than that l will use it for playing music, dvd's and occasional gaming.

Thanks,
SFR

 

Do you need high-quality analog output? Or is digital 5.1 enough? If digital is enough, have you considered the Callisto:

http://www.notebookforums.com/thread174331.html

 

My speaker sets are analog so that would be my choice. The Callisto seems nice, but I don't know if it is worth adding a digital-to-analog converter to work around it. Thanks for the pointer, though.

The D/Dock I mentioned has support for a half-size pci sound card but the docking station does not seem all that useful otherwise. Anyone with any experience on th D/Dock?

- SFR

 

Does someone have any experience with Dell's D/Dock for the m90 and pci soundcards and know which cards work?

Thanks
SFR