With the card coming in at half the price as well as being half the size, have Asus managed to trim some fat away from the DX’s bigger brother without sacrificing the power the flagship card offers – is this simply a fad diet that will be forgotten next week or technological progress that will be the mainstay audio solution in any budget minded gamers PC build? Read on.
Asus have since realised this and have unleashed a cut-down version of the DX2 in the form of the Xonar DX.
The plethora of bundled accessories and software was a welcome addition too but the package came in at a hefty price and as such would only be bought by those looking for a luxury, top-end product with little regard of budget.
While it didn’t have the X-FI chipset, it did have full EAX support up to level 5 through emulation and it impressed with its excellent gaming performance and audio processing. Towards the end of last year Asus released a high-end card that was a very viable alternative to X-FI in the DX2.
Anyone wishing to purchase a card had very limited choices available to them but times have now changed with the advent of relative newcomers such as Auzentech (based on Creative’s X-FI chipset), Razer and C-Media based offerings from Terratec and now Asus, the market is once more alive with choice, not only of manufacturers but of chipset based cards. Those who were early adopters of Windows Vista will testify that using vista along with an X-FI card was a very frustrating time.
Much to my dismay, Creative had the soundcard market all but wrapped up and despite their X-FI range impressing it was sadly let down with poor driver support. Why then have Asus, up until recently, declined to enter into the soundcard sector, a market previously dominated by a one company – Creative? Only Asus can answer that question I’m afraid but I suspect it comes down to the number of people who value a soundcard over the on-board alternatives most motherboards supply today. Testament to this fact is that Asus are a ‘Tier 1’ manufacturer for Intel’s current chipset/motherboard offerings are also among the top manufacturers of both ATI and Nvidia based graphics cards along with their own brand of Notebooks and multimedia. I did not enable any extra features for output apart from switching 'Dolby Home Theater' on and switching to Music profile.Disabled all options in there though such as 'Intelligent Equalizer' and so on.Asus have long been a leader in producing high quality, reliable hardware and components. Have I done the right thing here as I don't think my philips speakers are full range speakers as they are flat panel speakers that say '3D * SFP * TWEETER' Then went on to 'Flex Bass II' and set the 'Cut off frequency' to 120hz and set the 'Bass Level' to 6 dB as I like to hear the bass. I chose highest sample settings 192khz with 24bits. I have chose '5.1 Surround' output and NOT ticked the 'Surround Max' or 'LFE/Center Channel Swap' So far so good?
What are these 2 buttons located on the top right corner of the control panel? I checked the manual but can't find them in there.Īlso help me choose the correct settings please.ĥ.1 surround connected via 3.5mm jacks (green, orange and black).