Is it still worth while buying a sound board?

[lehtv]

^ the obvious route IMO is Asus Xonar DG. $25 or so, comes with headphone amp and dolby headphone.

 

[hennessy1]

I am in the market for a sound card and was looking at either of these two and was wondering if you guys could help. The main issue I want to avoid is the driver issue. These are the two cards

Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty vs.
ASUS Xonar D2X

 

[stahlhart]

Drivers were mainly why I went with the HD (that, and I'm an old school analog audio guy). I've had absolutely zero issues with it; it just works perfectly.

It looks like the Fatal1ty's drivers were similarly done (e.g. no XP support).

But, even taken with the required large grain of salt, Newegg reviews of any Creative card give one pause. It almost seems as though it's either going to work for you or it's not, and you just have no real way of knowing either way.

I also have the PCI version of the Fatality in my last build (XP), and it has worked perfectly from Day One also. Mabye I'm just lucky. But I never had any intention of trying to get it working with W7.

 

[hennessy1]

Since the days of vista all I have heard is creatives drivers are horrible. ASUS on the other hand I've heard as the defacto winner in that catagory. I just want the better card with the better driver support.

 

[Capt Caveman]

Creative drivers have been fine for a long while. Still using my PCI Fatality X-Fi Platinum on my Windows 7 system with zero issues.

 

[hennessy1]

It seems that recent buyers that have wrote reviews did not have the same luck on newegg.com

 

[yours truly]

^ the obvious route IMO is Asus Xonar DG. $25 or so, comes with headphone amp and dolby headphone.

Thanks I'll look into it. But does putting a sound card into a pci-e slot reduce the bandwidth for graphics cards, say 2 or more?

 

[lsv]

A PCIE Sound Blaster card is just not worth it. Onboard audio, these days can handle real time 24bit/48khz audio and really.. no records are finalized that high nor are video games. I'd save the money...

 

[hennessy1]

@yours truly-It depends on your boards layout. If your video card is in the first pci-e slot and you have more then two slots you can put it in the lowest one on the board and you'll be fine.

 

[lehtv]

Thanks I'll look into it. But does putting a sound card into a pci-e slot reduce the bandwidth for graphics cards, say 2 or more?

No. Xonar DG is a PCI card, and PCI bandwidth is independent of PCI-E bandwidth.

Whether adding a PCI-E card will lower the bandwidth of the PCI-E x16 slot used by the GPU depends on your motherboard and which PCI-E slots you're using.

 

[yours truly]

ah ok thanks guys. I do have a couple of PCI slots on the motherboard but I wouldn't be able to SLI then. There's a PCI-E 1x above the graphics card but I wonder if there's enough room to cool my GTX 580.

I tried using my old mixamp in the PC - the sound was ok. I might just stick to that instead.

Appreciate your advice all the same.

Cheers