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Creative Sound Blaster Live!

Sound Blaster Live! Daughter Board CT-4660

Vintage PCI Card Creative Sound Blaster Live! CT4760 with daughter board CT4660 / SPDIF IN Out and MIDI ports

Sound Blaster Live

This 16bit SoundBlaster PCI card is compatibille with DOS games, doesn’t have real OPL FM chip but FM is emulating.

Sound Blaster Daughter Board CT4660

review from 2001 http://www.3dsoundsurge.com/reviews/Live/Live.html

review from 1999 @ soundonsound.com

download windows xp and windows 7 drivers here:
https://support.creative.com

alternative drivers (windows 7, 10, 11) https://kxproject.spb.ru download

win 95/98 drivers

dos drivers

Sound Blaster CT4760 pdf manual

Cheap, but powerful PC

I recently purchased a used 2010 HP Z600 Workstation on eBay for less than 300 Euros. It’s a “Mercedes of computers,” solid as rock and was very expensive when it was new.

HP Z600 Workstation

The Workstation came with 2 Xeon 4-core E5630 80w processors, 8GB of RAM, a Quadro 4000 graphic card (still costing over $100 on eBay), and a Windows 7 sticker.

I discarded the existing 8GB of memory (2GB modules) and added 6 new 4GB DDR3 ECC server modules for just $50. Now, I have 24GB of RAM for only 50 dollars (the machine limit is 48GB) as server memory modules are very cheap.

With 2 2.53GHz Xeons (2.8GHz turbo), this system is faster than current top i7 processors and costs less than a comparable processor. In the 7zip benchmark, I get 30,000 MIPS while an i7-7700K gets the same score. However, it is worth noting that this dual-processor system consumes a significant amount of energy. The processors alone draw up to 160 watts :)
For just $100, I could buy two more powerful 6-core Xeon X5670 processors with 24 threads, which would almost double the performance.

A really cool addition is that this computer has a built-in FireWire port which I use along with Presonus and M-Audio interfaces.

2020 update: I’ve changed processors to 2x 80W E5649, (2,53 GHz with 2,93 GHz turbo) so now i have 12 cores and 24 threads :)

Old Xeon Workstations are cheap and powerful. ECC memory modules are cheap as well :)
This computer accepts and recognizes old PCI 5V sound cards like the Motu 424 or even SB Live or Yamaha YMF724 with a hardware OPL-3 chip. You can use it for old FM trackers or dos games with real opl-3 sound :)

some reviews from the past:
https://www.cgchannel.com/2009/10/hp-z600-workstation-review/
https://www.geek.com/chips/review-hp-z600-workstation-844631/