Sound Cards worth it anymore?

**Zheta** · 05-14-12, 04:39 PM

Creative's drivers are terribad.

**kibner** · 05-15-12, 06:43 AM

The xonar essence has a headphone amp, which makes a big difference for headphones that can take advantage, imo.

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**blackgold** · 05-15-12, 10:06 AM

I bought an Asus xonar dx? a few yeras ago and hadning discreet. I m nothing but problems with it. I have left it out on my last few builds. I may try to reinstall it shortly when I redo my PC this week to see if I can sort the issues out this time.
Brian

**DJ Ms. White** · 05-15-12, 10:15 AM

HT Omega still makes probably the best sound cards. Very good driver support from what I hear. I know that Trigger swears by them, and I see nothing but positive reviews for them.

**RhysJD3** · 05-15-12, 10:39 PM

I miss Aureal

**HeavyG** · 05-16-12, 11:44 PM

I noticed a pretty big difference when in loudness when I went from dedicated sound to on-board. The on-board has decent quality, but the levels from my X-Fi were so much better. I was forced to go with on-board as I have 3 x GPUs covering all of my slots. When I go with the GTX 690, I will likely go back to a dedicated card.

**jabberwock** · 05-16-12, 11:52 PM

Depends if your game is CPU dependent or not... I noticed a boost in TF2 land when I plugged a sound card in, but that game is notorious for CPU usage, and that's my bottleneck.

**SapiensErus** · 05-17-12, 12:11 AM

Originally Posted by HeavyG

I noticed a pretty big difference when in loudness when I went from dedicated sound to on-board. The on-board has decent quality, but the levels from my X-Fi were so much better. I was forced to go with on-board as I have 3 x GPUs covering all of my slots. When I go with the GTX 690, I will likely go back to a dedicated card.

Exactly another reason I am lookiing at getting a 690. I got the mATX mobo in hopes I could get whatever the next generation dual GPU card is... and I really like what it turned out to be. Plus I will have room for a discrete audio solution and a wireless card for LAN parties (the main reason i went with a tiny build). I am looking at some of the 192khz HT Omegas; I bet they sound nice. But the Recon mode feature of the Recon3d sounds pretty cool... It got some good reveiws.