ASUS Maximus VI Impact (Sound Card)

[aatroxed]

How much has on board sound progressed in comparison to having a dedicated sound card? I'm still rocking an older Creative Xtreme Music card from back in the day. Taking a look at the Impact reviewed on homepage, would the included card match the performance of a dedicated and support a 5.1?

 

[Dajinn]

All I'll say is, I bought the Impact for the sound blade(the included sound "card" they give you)and today I'm returning it. It's garbage for driving good headphones. You can't use the rear line out if you have decent headphones because they blew it on the design and only dedicated one amp to the rear out. They gave 3 amps to the front panel audio which is retarded in my opinion, so you have to plug in that ugly HD Audio front panel header and use the front jack.

Once you do that, you can get access to amplifier settings in the garbage skinned Realtek(themed in red/black RoG skin)control panel, however changing the amp setting to anything other than what it defaults to doesn't do anything and there is no indicated fix coming. The sound card can barely power my ATH-M50 headphones.

Let me just say that between my X-Fi Titanium and this PoS, the X-Fi is astronomically superior in every way and I'm glad to be using it again.

 

[aatroxed]

All I'll say is, I bought the Impact for the sound blade(the included sound "card" they give you)and today I'm returning it. It's garbage for driving good headphones. You can't use the rear line out if you have decent headphones because they blew it on the design and only dedicated one amp to the rear out. They gave 3 amps to the front panel audio which is retarded in my opinion, so you have to plug in that ugly HD Audio front panel header and use the front jack.

Once you do that, you can get access to amplifier settings in the garbage skinned Realtek(themed in red/black RoG skin)control panel, however changing the amp setting to anything other than what it defaults to doesn't do anything and there is no indicated fix coming. The sound card can barely power my ATH-M50 headphones.

Let me just say that between my X-Fi Titanium and this PoS, the X-Fi is astronomically superior in every way and I'm glad to be using it again.

Damn! That might lock out mini itx as a choice as there's only one slot for cards. Hmm, Are regular ITX board big enough to accommodate two lanes?

 

[_Rick_]

You could always use HDMI or SPDIF out and use an external D/A convertor. Especially for stereo sound that should be plenty good, for (non-DVD/BD) surround sound you'll need a compressor license (dolby live, dts.connect) which I'm not sure is integrated with this or other boards with digital outputs. But again, this is irrelevant for headphones. Binaural output should be generated on the application side, when headphones are selected as output device (hint: it probably isn't ).

But yeah, if you really value headphone sound quality, and can't be bothered with the front panel, external sound is the way to go. There's also external sound cards from $75 (Xonar U7, SB X-fi HD) that should provide outputs good enough for most headphones.