Are you planning on using the digital ins for transfers? If so this isn't the card to go with as it resamples.
I'm going to disagree with you on this one. I know that the Soundblaster name is not well respected among the taping community, but not all Soundblasters resample. The Soundblaster Live! series definitely resamples and should be avoided. However, I have a Soundblaster Audigy 2 Platinum internal card and it does not resample. I've transferred many, many hours of audio with this card and compared the results with transfers I've made with my M-Audio Audiophile 2496 and they produce identical results. The way I've verified this is to transfer a recording with the Soundblaster Audigy 2 Platinum internal card and again with the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 card, line them up with each other in a multitrack editing program, invert one of them and mix them down. The result is absolute silience in the result, with the exeption of minor flaws at the very first of the recording due to the fact that it takes a short period of time for the soundcard to synch to the S/PDIF source. The Soundblaster Audigy 2 Platinum card usually synchs up more quickly than the Audiophile 2496, so I often get slightly better transfers with the Sounblaster Audigy 2 Platinum internal card. Once the cards are syndhed to the source, you can't tell the difference between the two.
In my opinion, it's more of an issue of price. If all you're trying to do is transfer audio from an S/PDIF source, then the Audiophile 2496 works just fine and it has the price advantage.
The reason that I ended up with the Soundblaster Audigy 2 Platinum internal card was that M-Audio was slow to produce working drivers for Windows 2000. I fought with that company for months on end and finally gave up. It was almost a year later befoer M-Audio finally came out with drivers that worked properly under Windows 2000. Regardless, I left the Audiophile 2496 in my Windows 98 machine. I never put an S/PDIF card in my Windows XP machine because I already had a Nomad Jukebox 3, Hosa ODL276 converter and a firewire card in the computer. I just run S/PDIF coaxial into the Hosa ODL276, optical out to the NJB3 optical input, then transfer the result by firewire to the computer. That method also produces bit literal copies, again as compared to transfers directly through the Audiophile 2496 into the Windows 98 machine and transfers directly through the Soundblaster Audiby 2 Platinum internal into the Windows 2000 machine.
Whatever you do, plan to transfer your shows multiple times and compare the results of the multiple transfers to ensure that your setup is making identical copies every time. It's not always the soundcard's fault. Sometimes the errors are the fault of the host computer's southbridge chipset, expecially if you are not running the most current drivers and you're using a VIA chipset with an AMD processor. I spent hundreds of hours trying to troubleshoot my original Windows 98 machine's soundcard only to find out that the majority of my transfer problems were due to a poorly designed motherboard that used an Athlon processor and a VIA chipset. I finally just trashed that motherboard and started over. Now I won't use anything but an Intel-based motherboard. (That's probably like swearing off all Soundblasters, but I guess you learn to hate the companies that cost you the most troubleshooting time and at this point I'm not a fan of either AMD or VIA.)