Soundcard Choice

G

Gryff

n00b
Joined
Feb 15, 2006
Messages
4
Hello [H]!

I have narrowed down my selection between the Xonar DX/D2X or the Prelude. From what I have gathered from reviews, it seems that the Xonar is recommended over the Prelude if you are using Vista. In my case, I will be using Vista x64. Also, I will be mostly using my upcoming rig for gaming and music and I had a few questions for you guys and gals.

1) Is the Xonar good for gaming? I know it can emulate EAX effects and it will take a performance hit doing so, but is this performance hit actually meaningful in deciding between the two?

2) For games that do not utilize EAX, I assume that both the Prelude and Xonar in regards to FPS is the same (keeping all parts the same except for the soundcards). Is my assumption correct?

I'll admit it, I am partial to the Xonar, but if the Prelude has a better overall fit for me, I would definitely favor it more. Any additional information that anyone can share is also welcomed.

Sorry for the long post and possible "stupid" questions :p. Thanks for dropping by in this thread!
 
If you're looking for a card mostly for gaming and CPU utilization is important, this new PCI-E Titanium faired best in a synthetic benchmark (measurin CPU utilization when using a certain number of sound buffers) against a PCI-based X-Fi and the Xonar DX PCI-E (and it has the bonus of EAX hardware):

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2316949,00.asp

And so far I've been pretty pleased with it. I got it mostly because the PCI-based X-Fi has problems with certain hardware combos & 4GB of RAM (this includes the Prelude); the PCI-E X-Fi Titanium doesn't have this issue.

Don't let me scare you from the Prelude, your particular hardware combo might not suffer from the infamous 4GB snap-crackle-pop PCI X-Fi sound plague.

My general impression is that either the Prelude or the D2X may sound better for high quality music or movie playback if you use high-end speakers. If you just use some mid-range speakers like my Z-5500s you probably won't notice a big difference in quality between any mid to high end sound card.

One other consideration is space available. On some motherboards you may not be able to fit the Xonar D2X (on mine, the card can't fit due to a heatpipe.) The PCI-E X-Fi Titanium is just short of 5 inches, making it extremely compact. It fits in my board's only remaining PCI-E x1 slot with an inch to spare.
 
Thanks for the input. Yeah, I'm actually using the exact same speakers as you are.

I'll consider that new Titanium card as well. I've been using an Audigy 2 ZS on Windows XP and it seems decent, but from what I have heard is that Creative drivers for Vista are not too great.

I'll do some more browsing to see if it would be problematic in my case, if it seems fine and my speakers won't really benefit from the DX or Prelude, then I guess I can't complain with the Titanium. Being priced between the Prelude/D2X and the DX is welcomed.
 
Today i received my Xonar DX, Ive been using a Creative Audigy for years as i found no fault with it but this year i upgraded to a new C2D hardware and Vista 64. The Creative drivers are completely buggered for this OS.

Not only that but it seems creative seem to not really care about their customers as in regards to the whole Daniel K situation. I havent had a chance to look at the CPU usage during games but the audio playback seems minimal due to the hardware processing on the card itself.

Overall in compairson to my old audigy it's like night and day. The difference is clearly there and even my onboard HDA (newest chipset Azalia 889) cannot hold a candle to it.

The drivers work and so do the Dolby enhansments. For a inxpensive card iam well impressed for what ive currently heard. Even in games like TF2 it has made a diifernce.

I used the card for mainly music and for that its superb but as i don;t have any EAX based games i cannot form an opinion. But from what ive heard the card can emulate EAX5 with some cpu usage but with cpu's being so powerful these days im sure its not an issue.
 
For what it's worth, I am now using a Xonar DX with Vista x64, and I think it is leaps and bounds better than my previous X-Fi and I actually prefer it's implementation of Dolby emulation technologies to CMSS 3D in games, and for EAX games, it sounds good too. As for music quality, it is superior to my X-Fi.

I haven't had a problem with the drivers at all. The driver utility could use a better GUI and/or hotkeys, but that criticism can be levelled at any of these companies.
 
Preludes 120db signal-to-noise ratio makes it pretty sick for audio quality but maybe not as good for gaming. I really don't think it makes a huge difference which one you go with here.
 
Creative's made some consumer relation gaffes, but I think they're slowly improving.

I personally didn't have a problem with the Vista x64 drivers on my PCI X-Fi Fatal1ty, unless I put in 4GB of RAM, in which case I get the aforementioned Snap-Crackle-Pop (SCP) noise on my audio output.

Although from what I've read this is due to a combination of factors, such as motherboard PCI/PCI-E/Memory implementation, and drivers can only do so much to work around the problem (something to do with the amount of information being processed by the CPU at one time and the motherboard not handling it very well, causing the sound card to not be 'serviced' frequently enough, leading to crackling.)

On my motherboard, at least, using the PCI-E Titanium X-Fi helped me use 4GB of RAM without this annoying noise. But it depends largely on your motherboard whether or not you'll even see this issue. I just wish Creative would compile a list of known factors (for instance, due to BIOS improvements and X-Fi driver upgrades over the last year, using 4GB of RAM only causes the SCP noise when I used 2 video cards in SLI.) Odd enough if you dial down the speed on your RAM using memory dividers the SCP will go away, but you have to run your RAM at almost half its normal speed to achieve this 'fix.'

From what I've read about Asus's EAX emulation on Vista it seems like a good alternative, at least from reviews and user opinions. And hopefully the competition will make Creative more responsive to users. Certainly it seems like Nvidia and Intel benefit from such competition, even if they are in a dominant market position.

From what I've seen in different reviews there was no significant FPS difference in using the software based EAX emulation that Asus provides or the hardware acceleration from the X-Fi. The only real differences are seen when you artificially CPU-limit a game by using a really low resolution. Of course if you run into a game (or situation within a game) that happens to really tax your processor than offloading that maybe 2-5% of audio processing from your CPU might make a difference.
 
Ah, so many choices :eek:

I'm planning for a Quad for my next rig build, so I think I can spare processor cycles to throw at the audio. One more question though, if the game is EAX enabled, then the X-Fi will perform better than the Xonar; however, if the games such as TF2 and Crysis which do no use EAX, would the Xonar and X-Fi be pretty much comparable in performance? I can only assume both cards in this situation would be using the CPU to handle the audio.

With not many upcoming EAX games, I can only assume that the X-Fi's main strength would be weakened.

Maybe a nice MIR or sale will make my choice for which card to buy.
 
I had always been a creative fan since the early days. That was all I installed in my rigs.
But I seriously believe that after the Audigy 2 ZS, the company has gone in a downward spiral. I have had nothing but problems with newest drivers before this new beta release and the beta has not fixed anything. I am surprised they actually released some different drivers. It took them... what... a couple years for a beta driver?
I had purchased an X-fi in hopes of solving problems, and that created more. Vista issues and the whole Alchemy thing and horrid customer support have just really turned me off of the company.
Not to mention the whole Fatality thing now. What, does this kid own the company now? Everything they release has to be Fatality something. = Garbage
More power to someone trying to make a buck but from a company/customer perspective, it's ridiculous.

I have been looking into the different options available. While it seems a couple sound cards are worthy as competition for creative, they still seem to have some bugs to work out.

I read various reviews about the Asus card and am a little hesitant, but anxious at the same time, to try it out. Auzentech sounds like they have a good product, based off the x-fi but improved parts and software. HT Omega is also a contender.

I use the soundcard for various things. Gaming mainly, listening to music and sound recording.
 
I've been using Xonar D2 for a couple of months, and have been mostly happy with it. I upgraded from X-Fi XtremeMusic and especially sound clarity is much much better with Xonar. I have the Xonar hooked up to an oldish Yamaha RX-V640 HT receiver via optical connection using Dolby Digital Live. I also have a pair of HD650s plugged in front out, Xonar drives them without any problems and sound quality is fantastic too.

Speaking of DDL, both X-Fi Titanium and Prelude seem to require driver activation for Dolby Digital Live and that might be an issue, if you are upgrading or reinstalling often.

In my opinion, game compatibility has been acceptable so far, but not perfect. Most of the games I have played have worked nicely, but there are some notable exceptions. Mass Effect in EAX5 mode has completely messed up sound balance (LOUD ambient noises, muted speech) that can't be fixed with in-game volume level adjustments. Assassin's Creed has slight stuttering in dialog, and as far as I know, there's no fix currently for that. Both of these games work perfectly with X-Fi.

I'm very concerned with lacking driver support, I know Creative was horrible with drivers, but so far it seems that Asus isn't much better. The latest BETA drivers are from February. They have put out a hot-fix for two games (Bioshock and HL2) in May, but that's it. Considering that EAX5 support is achieved through software emulation, I would consider it very very important to keep up with driver updates and actively fix problem with newer games.

If you want maximum EAX compatibility and a guarantee that all games are going to work fine with your sound card, go with a X-Fi. Otherwise, Xonar is an excellent choice. :)
 
Gryff said:
...if the games such as TF2 and Crysis which do no use EAX, would the Xonar and X-Fi be pretty much comparable in performance? I can only assume both cards in this situation would be using the CPU to handle the audio.

With not many upcoming EAX games, I can only assume that the X-Fi's main strength would be weakened.
Click to expand...

EAX is just a set of extensions (for adding reverb effects to sounds, or filters to make sounds 'muffled' as if a wall or curtain were in between your ears and the sounds.) The higher versions of EAX just add more simultaneous individual sounds and effects on those sounds.

EAX can be used to extend OpenAL or DirectSound3D (which isn't supported in Vista.)

However, even if games don't use EAX, the X-Fi still provides hardware accelerated sound vs. the Asus software solution if the game uses OpenAL (or DirectSound3D via ALchemy to OpenAL.) In this situation the actual sound quality won't differ, it is just a slight difference in CPU use for audio processing.

EAX-supporting games would probably be slightly more CPU intensive for the Asus (although probably only slightly), and there's been much made by Creative on how the Asus implementation doesn't provide as many sounds & effects-per-sound as a true X-Fi, but reviewers seem to think its not a big difference, really.

There are some games that don't use OpenAL or DirectSound3D at all, and these will have to be processed in software no matter the card, pending further audio API changes. Crysis is one of these.

But Team Fortress 2 is a DirectSound3D game, and can be hardware accelerated via ALchemy for the X-Fi cards. I personally haven't tested this, but have tested Half-Life 2, which works fine (although the game only uses DirectSound3D in 32-bit mode, not in 64 bit.)
 
mlaine said:
Speaking of DDL, both X-Fi Titanium and Prelude seem to require driver activation for Dolby Digital Live and that might be an issue, if you are upgrading or reinstalling often.
Click to expand...

I know the Prelude has the infamous 'activation' limit, but I did read a customer support rep respond to a Prelude owner that this limit would be lifted.

The user in question had reached the re-install limit and was issued another 'key' or whatever. So I think Auzentech will be reasonable with that.

I think Creative & Auzentech were probably threatened with a lawsuit by whomever owns the Dolby copyrights/patents, so had to institute some sort of controls on the encoding software.

I have not read anything about activation limits on the Titanium, and I haven't run into any personally (although I've only had to activiate the DDL software once; I've reinstalled the card a few times, but I haven't done a complete hard drive wipe or transfer yet.) At least for the Titanium the DDL is a separate 'software pack' that you can leave installed if you re-install the hardware.
 
Balthazor said:
I know the Prelude has the infamous 'activation' limit, but I did read a customer support rep respond to a Prelude owner that this limit would be lifted.

The user in question had reached the re-install limit and was issued another 'key' or whatever. So I think Auzentech will be reasonable with that.

I think Creative & Auzentech were probably threatened with a lawsuit by whomever owns the Dolby copyrights/patents, so had to institute some sort of controls on the encoding software.

I have not read anything about activation limits on the Titanium, and I haven't run into any personally (although I've only had to activiate the DDL software once; I've reinstalled the card a few times, but I haven't done a complete hard drive wipe or transfer yet.) At least for the Titanium the DDL is a separate 'software pack' that you can leave installed if you re-install the hardware.
Click to expand...

Ah, it's good to know that Auzentech is relaxing the activation limit policy. I wonder if activation is tied only to DDL software or is it required for DTS Connect too? So far with Xonar, both of them are available without activation, hopefully Asus won't change their policy.
 
Thanks for the input all! Balthazor you've been a great resource. :)

It appears that NCIX is selling the Prelude for $129.99(CAD) AR which is about $1.00 more than the Titanium. I think I may just go with the Prelude considering the really small price difference. If I get the snap, crackle, and pop I can always exchange the card for the Titanium.

Again, thanks for the help all.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top