News - ASUS shows off new Xonar DG soundcard

[HEXUS]

Latest card is optimised for headphone gaming and home theatre use.

Read more.

[Nelsaidi]

£30?
Personally interested.

[kalniel]

Smart move by Asus, while I'm not 100% convinced it'll be the best gaming card around, I think an affordable headphone-amp solution in low-profile (and PCI!) is ideal for those wanting an upgrade over onboard sound.

[AdamAnubis]

Will there be a review coming on these?

Been thinking about getting a decent soundcard if it'll have some audible improvement for less than £80

[Guppy]

I was wandering what would happen if I bought this card but wanted to use the front panel audio on my case for my headset, is it possible to use both the front panel audio with the soundcard but disable the motherboard sound?

[Agent]

I went from Creative to ASUS because of driver issues. Sadly, I pretty much got the same.
It also used to be common (don't know if it still is) to have to 'hack' the latest drivers to install on older cards. Even though the shared the same common chip, they would lock out the old ones (Creative anyone ) and put it down to 'an unsupported environment'.

I hate the soundcard market

[Singh400]

Meh, my on-board sound is fine... Certainly won't be buying anything Creative again.

[kingpotnoodle]

I have my HTPC's onboard sound disabled and use the HDMI audio on a Radeon 5450 to a AV Amplifier.

Unless I'm very much mistaken using a card like this would have no appreciable benefit given that I am just passing a digital signal over the HDMI to an amp?

[kingpotnoodle]

I was wandering what would happen if I bought this card but wanted to use the front panel audio on my case for my headset, is it possible to use both the front panel audio with the soundcard but disable the motherboard sound?

Looks like a FP audio connection on the edge if the card...

[kalniel]

I was wandering what would happen if I bought this card but wanted to use the front panel audio on my case for my headset, is it possible to use both the front panel audio with the soundcard but disable the motherboard sound?

Do you mean wire up the soundcard to the front audio panel? Yes, possible.

I went from Creative to ASUS because of driver issues. Sadly, I pretty much got the same.
It also used to be common (don't know if it still is) to have to 'hack' the latest drivers to install on older cards. Even though the shared the same common chip, they would lock out the old ones (Creative anyone ) and put it down to 'an unsupported environment'.

I hate the soundcard market

That's Creative for you - the whole X-Fi/X-Fi2 thing was not well handled at all. I've not seen that to the same extent from Asus, but haven't been following the drivers for too long. In general once I've got a set that work I leave it at that.

I have my HTPC's onboard sound disabled and use the HDMI audio on a Radeon 5450 to a AV Amplifier.

Unless I'm very much mistaken using a card like this would have no appreciable benefit given that I am just passing a digital signal over the HDMI to an amp?

Yup I think you're right there.

[Agent]

D
That's Creative for you - the whole X-Fi/X-Fi2 thing was not well handled at all. I've not seen that to the same extent from Asus, but haven't been following the drivers for too long. In general once I've got a set that work I leave it at that.

Aye. Thing is, the ASUS drivers would need to be changed depending on game last time I had one ,which made it very hard to stick with one and leave it

They probably have improved by now, but it does leave a bitter taste.

Currently running a Audigy2 with Daniel_K drivers. Pretty much no bugs, but then again you would expect that when they have had how many years to get them stable?

[Terbinator]

The soundcard scene is so confusing and has the stigma of poor support as pointed out by others.

[TooTay]

I went from Creative to ASUS because of driver issues. Sadly, I pretty much got the same.
It also used to be common (don't know if it still is) to have to 'hack' the latest drivers to install on older cards. Even though the shared the same common chip, they would lock out the old ones (Creative anyone ) and put it down to 'an unsupported environment'.

I hate the soundcard market

I share your sentiments. I have also recently moved from a creative card to a xonar one .

I had been having issues with choppy sound and sounds being missing in games, looking for resolutions to my problem I found that there there is an individual who got tired of the "monkey coders" as he calls them and made a set of unified drivers for the Xonar cards.

You can find them here http://brainbit.wordpress.com/2010/0...ified-drivers/ certainly helped me out, might help others too if you are having issues with "unsupported environments"

[kalniel]

Currently running a Audigy2 with Daniel_K drivers. Pretty much no bugs, but then again you would expect that when they have had how many years to get them stable?

Yeah I still run an Audigy 2ZS for pretty much the same reasons

The Xonar was fine in my experience as long as you didn't try to do anything fancy - EAX emulation was not up to scratch, but put it in hi-fi mode (no DSP) and it worked fine.

TooTay, they look interesting.

[Percy1983]

To be honest I got rid of my audigy2 for an x-fi due to support, in my case I just don't like my onboard using processor cycles.

But in most cases onboard audio seems fine to me.

[kingpotnoodle]

I bought an Creative X-Fi Xtreme Gamer (Ebay £34.99) because of choppy sound in games using Realtek onboard... it really is miles better, no driver issues, punchier bass and clearer sound overall :-)