as was stated earlier when you record lower you buffer, when you play back you have to increase your buffer - give it a try and see if it works until you are able to upgrade.

I certainly don't believe a word of ocenskate's post,, notice the post count. If any of it where true there's be a lot of people using these cards. He's claiming performance you only get with the higher end cards like RME or Lynx. That would certainly be "to good to be true" at 1/10 th the price. 
 
I'm not suprised by the playback latency. I'm not sure if Creative has spent any money on good drivers,,,ever,, but there's only one way to find out and that's perform a loop back test and see if the tracks line up. I highly doubt it. MY old Audicy card was off by a mile. It was the reason I joined this forum looking for answers..the answer has not changed,, buy a PROPER audio interface..not a sound card.. sound cards are for gaming and playback of movies and music. 

Technically speaking, if an audio interface hooks directly into the PCI bus, it has the same potential performance as Thunderbolt because there are no added USB or FireWire layers. The main problem with sound cards is lack of dedicated ASIO drivers (the variability of ASIO4ALL has been well-documented - sometimes it works fine, sometimes it mugs your system), noise due to inadequate shielding as the card is exposed to the computer's "dirty" insides, less-than-wonderful mic preamps, and limited I/O (e.g., no XLRs, no phantom power).

Well... OP problem is (may be was, the thread is old...) most probably NOT audio interface related. "Some" VSTi have latency, not all of them. How can it be the interface related?
 
But since the discussion has moved from OP topic: as Paul P, oceanskate7 and I have already written, SB has own ASIO driver. And in general, the latency of these cards is non issue. At least when compared with most cheap "pro" audio interfaces. Issues/problems/limitations are in different areas: driver installation, sound quality (at least for old SB), the number of input and outputs. But latency is ok. And as GM player it works better then MS software and TTS-1, at least for MIDI files from the Internet

To all - this thread HAD been from the distant past of about 18 months ago, until a few posts back it had been dredged back up.
 
I sincerely doubt (and hope) that the original poster has been sitting anxiously at his computer, these past 18 months, waiting to see if anyone else would jump in and get things settled for him.
 
Bob Bone
 

Cactus Music
I'm not suprised by the playback latency. I'm not sure if Creative has spent any money on good drivers,,,ever,, but there's only one way to find out and that's perform a loop back test and see if the tracks line up. I highly doubt it.

When I have compared with loopback test my X-Fi with Scarlett 2i2 (first generation), X-Fi won that competition in latency (but only in latency).

You mean the Scarlett didn't line up??? 
My 6i6 was bang on. 
 
I used the audio loopback method. You take a midi snare or ? and bounce it to audio. 
Then you patch output to input ( turn off input echo ) and record it to a new audio track.
 
Zoom way in and compare the offset. Try it in ASIO and WDM mode if your interface supports both. My 6i6 does not support WDM but my Tascam does. Notice in the picture how Session drummers audio lines up perfectly with the midi track,, The ASIO tracks are early,, I used high and low settings , made no difference,,then WDM mode is late.. this is important. You might not even know it's happening. 
Top track Midi
Next Session drummer
next  ASIO normal setting
next  ASIO Highest setting
last track WDM mode
 
 

Here is my Scarlett. Only ASIO , and all buffer settings will give you the same results, Obviously settings have no effect on loop back offset testing. 

im simply baffled we are even discussing using a SoundBlaster card  

I just found this screen shot of a test of my Creative card..mind it was on my older duo core PC.