[deathfun]

Since I was an idiot and didn't check my motherboard, I've been stuck with a 2.1

But now since I've got a bigger desk and am intending to do some more computer shopping related things, I figured why not


Anyone got suggestions on decent sound cards?

[Grizzly]

Asus Xonar DG or DGX is a very decent and very cheap soundcard, although it is primarely intended for headphone users (built in headphone amp and dolby headphone and stuff). The Xonar DX/XD has some more stuff, which really can help in some games that support it, esp. if you have a surround set.

[Nuke]

i just threw one into the scrap heap a few weeks ago. dont miss it none.

[Ghostavo]

If you decide to get a Xonar, search for the relevant drivers before actually getting one.

I have a Xonar D2X and it was a pain to find drivers for Windows 8. I actually had to resort to unofficial ones.

[Flak]

Yeah, Xonar have problems with Win 8 from what I heard, it is designed mostly for Win 7. You can check others, like Creative Recon. Oh, one more thing, be sure to get good speakers, good soundcard with bad speakers won't exactly give you a good sound.

[deathfun]

Speakers are already covered so that's not really a problem
And luckily I've got Win7, so that's a bonus as far as Xonar is concerned

[BloodEagle]

I've never really understood the obsession with surround sound. 

[Fury]

I've had nothing but trouble with Xonar in games. I wouldn't recommend them, C-MEDIA's driver support is atrocious. If you want to play games, get any of the Creative cards. You should be able to find X-Fi series of cards cheap now.

[deathfun]

C-Media lacks decent driver support, good to know


Anyone have some thoughts on external sound cards?

I've never really understood the obsession with surround sound. 

MORE SOUND MORE POWER MORE NOISE MORE EVERYTHING BAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

[Fury]

External cards are of use only if you don't have free expansion slots or want to plug it into a laptop. Otherwise, don't bother.

You might want to consider getting surround headphones that come with built-in soundcard though.

[headdie]

If your bothered about surround you might as well go whole hog and go creative, anything from audidgy onward will give you good quality, though for driver support on win 8 I would go X-FI

[Klaustrophobia]

I've had nothing but trouble with Xonar in games. I wouldn't recommend them, C-MEDIA's driver support is atrocious. If you want to play games, get any of the Creative cards. You should be able to find X-Fi series of cards cheap now.

it disturbs me greatly to learn that creative isn't the worst brand for driver support.  i thought Xonar was supposed to be our savior from creative. 


on another note, what's up with all the newest high end sound cards only having an RCA jack or two and optical?  what happened to standard speaker/headphone connections?  my 5.1 computer speakers hook up with three 3.5mm jacks.  i couldn't get a new card if i wanted to apparently.  are we expected to buy a HT receiver and speakers to actually use the 5.1/7.1 they claim now, or can you get computer surround speakers that use optical or the other things now?

[headdie]

am I the only person in the world who has rarely had a problem with creative products?  I have had them since the 386 era with out a hitch, am i just a statistical anomaly or something?

[Klaustrophobia]

If a creative card works out of the box with the included driver CD and you never end up needing to update or reinstall the drivers, you'll probably be fine.  My x-fi wasn't trouble for a good while.  I updated drivers once while it was still in an XP machine, and that was hell due to creative's website being all but broken (the download speed was at times measuring in BYTES per second, and never broke 10 kb/s) and the fact that a myriad of other creative programs and components other than the driver itself are required to make the damn thing work right and none of that played nice with the new driver.  But at the end of the day it updated and worked and everything played nice. 

Then the move to 7 came, and I got to do the driver olympics.  More downloading from the broken website (this time wondering which of the versions I'm supposed to use as there are several marked vista/7), the wonder that is Alchemy, and the discovery that creative doesn't even seem to have a support department.  In the end this time, the hodgepodge of original driver disk programs and downloaded files did NOT work all together, and while the final state worked and left me with good sound, some of the components were missing.  I can't switch the 'mode' of the card anymore for example.  Luckily it's stuck in the music mode.  So it works for a while, and then out of the blue one day my sound has gone to ****.  Like cell phone quality kind of bad.  No amount of driver tweaking would fix it and creative didn't even respond to me this time, so out of desperation i tried a driver wipe.  This was when the 7th level of driver hell started.  These same drivers I had before (I think, hard to be sure with the piss poor website) that were hard to get installed then now simply wouldn't install at all.  The 'auto update' program was the only thing that even recognized I had a card installed, but all it did was install a bunch of bloatware.  It took me more than a week to get my sound fixed.  I'm still not sure how I did it.  It was a very particular install/uninstall/reinstall order involving several different driver versions and various on-disk compontents that creative said I didn't need and pretended didn't even exist.  Then this same thing happened two more times.  I had decided when it happens again I was going to go for a Xonar or some other brand (way back when I was first looking into sound cards Turtle Beach was in the game and thought to be every bit as good as creative), but now that I'm hearing Xonar has worse driver problems.... 

[headdie]

hmmm, ok again scratching my head.  while getting the right driver did involve pulling the variation number off it, that was about as technical or difficult as it has ever gotten for me.  Take my current card for the last five years i couldnt tell you where the install disk is so i have to use the driver downloads when i reinstall the operating system as i never remember to back the driver up and usually prefer to use the latest version anyway.  I suppose its one of those mileage varies situations and i have just gotten plain lucky so far .

[MP-Ryan]

I've been pretty happy with my Auzentech card.  It's Creative X-Fi based.