well first of all you don't have too buy creative speakers
Right now I'm running a fortisiimmo three through a yamaha natural sound system that has a 5.1 klipsch 1100 watt speakers on them. A little overkill but they weren't being used for anything else.
The audigy 2 is great for games, but for people like me who need digital toslink the audigy 2 is a no go. I don't know why Creative didn't put the fiber optic output ports on the back either of the audigy extigy or ex, it annoys the hell out of me.
The Revolution was a great card but it only had digital coax, so no center channel.
The terratec sky or space looks great, but it's the envy 24 chipset so it's going to high cpu usuage but it does have toslink.
It sort of sucks right now for people like me who want toslink, but a decent gaming card.