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Originally Posted by cheesehawk
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Without wanting to derail the thread: May I ask why?
Their drivers have improved and the driver issues after the release of Vista and W7 were unavoidable due to EAX, a technology no other card had but which was disabled due to how DirectX 9 and 10 work.
Only soundcards with standard features were able to avoid the mess - creative with EAX however could not. You could research the topic if you like but it's a thing of the past. It was NOT a fault of creative labs and it was a mess that was almost impossible to solve.
That said I run about a good dozen of these cards in two of my own and computers of friends and relatives and NONE of them has issues or procudes them. The alternatives are okay as well but much more expensive. For a gamer the Creative cards are great, fully hardware accelerated thus boosting the performance etc.
The ASUS card you mention, on the other hand,
-costs at least twice as much
-doesn't even support EAX / EFX / OpenAL only generic modes
-you could better use that money and invest it into the speakers and get the Edifiers
Overtall that will give you better sound quality (you won't hear the quality of the ASUS over the Creatives if you don't have some 1k+ headphones, speakers attached) and better compatibility with games due to OpenAL EAX EFX etc. I don't see a reason to dump the added money.
Oh and by the way. ASUS cards are also geared towards gamers and they also use technology that's way not for the audiophile. I quote the specs of the Xonar here:
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Smart Volume Normalizer
Normalizes the volume of all audio sources into a constant level and also enhances your 3D sound listening range and advantages in gaming
Xear 3D Virtual Speaker Shifter:
Virtual 7.1 speaker positioning
Magic Voice:
Xonar Essence STX provides VocalFX, the latest vocal effect technologies for gaming and VoIP, including: -VoiceEX: produces vivid environmental reverberation for your voice in EAX games -ChatEX: emulates different background environment effects when you chat online -Magic Voice: changes your voice pitch to different types (Monster/Cartoon…) for disguising your real voice or just for fun in online chatting
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So clearly sound changing technology. The same technology that Creative offers and that let's the audiophiles say that Creative cards are changing the sound and thus are for gamers blablabla. I can't see a difference honestly but obviously the buyer has to decide if he want's to pay that additional price.