Soundcard Selection Help

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berndawg3

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 2, 2008
Messages
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Hey everyone.

I'm planning a build for the end of May/beginning of June that will be going with me to college. I've got most of it planned out since I'm pretty excited. I've done tons of research on all of the parts I'm gonna be getting and as of now they stand as follows: DFI Lanparty P35, Q6600 with Tuniq Tower, 8800GTS 512, Corsair HX620, 4GB G.SKill. They might change a bit, but not likely. Anyways, I'm kind of burned out right now and have a paper to write on terrorism so I thought I'd ask the experts here.

Which soundcard for Vista should I get? I listen to tons of music and game pretty often. I heard about the whole Creative debacle and would prefer to stay away from any of their cards, although I'm open to the Prelude. This card needs to have Digital Out (Optical or Coaxial, preferably optical) to go to my home theater amplifier. It also will be used with Sony MDR-V6's (or some other closed, comfortable, inexpensive headphone someone would recommend). Sound quality and reliability are the biggest factors to me. I would prefer DDL and DTS encoding. The cheaper the better, but I'm willing to pay more to get more. I just don't know what I should get between the Asus Xonar, X-Fi Prelude, B-gears, M-audio, etc. There's a lot of choices.

Also, does EAX really sound THAT much better?

Thanks!
 
Check out these review of several cards designed to work under Vista

http://techreport.com/articles.x/13874

I like the specs on the Asus but they are all nice cards.
As for EAX 5.0 problem is that Vista disconnected a bit audio from hardware and benefits more from almost anything that will give you audio.
EAX 5.0 is broken in Vista so in order to get the best audio with and Creative card mostly the X-fi you would need to use Alchemy which is a glide wrapper, converts EAX into audio understood by Vista. Other cards emulate onboard the EAX 5.0 so you don't have to bother with additional glide wrappers to convert audio.
Here's and article about the Asus card and it's supposed EAX 5.0

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14447

As for EAX, I've had and Audigy2 EX. and later on got an X-fi and honestly I still think audio feels same, does improve quite a bit for headset audio positioning but it's a pain having to switch modes between Game, Media and Create modes. On old cards sound would always be good. I'm actually a bit upset with the whole mode thing. I noticed too some of the special effects disappeared, I remember being able to play a song and change effects so female voices could sound like men, vice versa, even like chipmunks. I do say this EAX 5.0 does improve a lot for 3D positioning when it comes to using headsets.

I would think if you have a nice motherboard you might just get away with using onboard audio since I don't think you will find that much audio improvement under Vista.
Anyways good luck.

I didn't seem to pick up what OS you are going to use but gaming XP rocks, can always dual boot if you need it for some DX10 games. And for audio wise Hardware Accelerated for XP definitely for Vista check out the links I posted. Gaming under XP unfortunately I still think Creative might still have some grip on it.

Tought time to build a PC at the moment with all the changes of formats and specs.
Things to keep and eye out for is USB 3.0, Display Port (I think will pick up since no royalty fee's like HDMI), PCI Express 16X 2.0 (not much speed increase over old ver).
I don't even know where the whole computing thing is going, a few tough months.
 
Ahh, if the computer industry was any different, it wouldn't be as much fun to be a part of. I will be dual booting with Vista and Ubuntu, Vista being my main OS. Which card would you recommend? I do want to go for a card over the on-board audio. I'm pretty picky and believe I'll be able to tell a difference.
 
If the motherboard is high end enough the audio will be fine. As for which one for Vista check out the link on the top, has the 3 main players in the Vista battleground. I have a nice Asus motherboard, tried the audio once it was pretty good. You can always hold off on the Audio card till the end once you get your system together see if onboard audio is up to par. As for those other two cards. For Vista I like the Asus Xonar by reading the review. But then again I don't own it so I can't vouch for it.
If you plan on gaming a lot I recommend u triple boot then, Ubuntu, Vista and XP sp2. No self respecting gamer should leave XP out of the equation.
 
I'm just not a solid enough gamer to warrant using XP. I play for fun here and there, but just not enough. Plus, I usually play in short runs in between working on photoshop and things so I don't want to be constantly switching between OSes. I do appreciate your input, though!
 
Well I do find that working raw files on Photoshop CS2 is a bit smoother and faster with XP, there's a lot of things that it does a little bit smoother. Money wise you might just be fine with Vista.
Do you plan on using Vista 32bit or 64bit, if so make sure there are drivers for it.
 
I already have Vista 32bit which is what I plan on using. I'll be putting in 4 gigs of RAM, and I know that I"ll only be able to see ~3.5GB, but 3.5 on 2 sticks seems better than just 3GB on 2 sticks. Plus, I will probably run Ubuntu in 64-Bit. Since now I have a P4 3.2GHZ and an old SATA HD, and I'll be upgrading to a Q6600 and a WD 640GB Raid 0, I think it'll still feel a million times smoother :)
 
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