I have some money to spend on myself, now I decided to upgrade my PC little by little and I wanted to start off with a sound card. What I'm looking for in a sound card is to be great with games and music, I know there's creative sound cards, but since there are more out there I just want someone to point me out to a right one. What I'm running is my headphones HD650 with an cute beyond amp, and I've been using stock sound card on my PC.
An even better thing,would be to check the Sound Card Reviews by ROBSCIX. Right here at Guru Reviews.
I've been down the Creative road and Auzentech (based on Creative) and I'm now with ASUS and I could not be happier. I've been through so many driver issues with Creative that I don't think I will ever go back.
Since you have a external amp already then you may want the X-FI HD for its gaming features, Since like the STX/ST it also uses audiophile components too and would also make a good Dac to use with your amp. The X-FI HD uses jrcs in the I/Vs and single channel LME49710NAs in its two buffers. Since you mention you want something good for games, then the X-FI HD's gaming features. The Xonar ST/X are good cards as well, as I used to own a Xonar STX, But they can only emulate eax 5 thru GX mode and GX mode it self isnt perfect. Tho they have a headphone amp. But the thing is you have a good external headphone amp already. Also the ST/X cost more then the X-FI HD. Amazon and jr.com both sells the X-FI HD for around 128-150. I had my X-FI HD for almost two weeks.I not having any issues with the drivers, I didnt have issues with past X-FI's either. Tho I had minor issues with Xonar STX but do to its DSGX2.5/GX mode. If you didnt already have a amp and didnt care about gaming features then the STX would be a perfect choice for you. openAL is still alive it wasnt effected like Direct sound hal was, and games that are openal still uses eax 5 or efx then what people realize. THey usually think its dead as well. But it isnt. Tho if you dont care about actual eax5 or eax3-4 for your games you have already that support them both and not eax5. The a ST/X would be a good choice then.
there's a lot of Asus lovers out there and with good reason, but the x-fi's do have a unique feature set with regards to gaming. if you're running vista or win7 though, it's probably best avoid the older generations of xfi's. the xfi hd is the only creative card designed solely for vista/win7's audio stack. it also has no legacy support for XP.
Well thanks for the suggestions, I ended up with Xonar STX, not bad at Fry's Electronics, thought for a second that I was going to spend about $200 dollars, but ending up getting it for $170! cool deal! Also if anyone is looking for sound cards they are on sale there for good prices!! About to install this bad boy after this post
Make sure to run the RCA outs on the card to your amp, also i suggest you to swap out the default jrcs thats in the i/V op-amp socket. The RCA out uses all 3 op-amps. You do not wanna plug the hp amp out into the amp. as that will be double amp which is a no no.
Well guys, no luck at all.... I bought the card, removed one of my video cards and place the sound card where it was. I turn on my computer, its not even detecting the device nor the drivers. I tried connecting it to a different spot on the motherboard, I get nothing out of it D: I think I might have gotten a bad one out of the batch, and considering that it was the last one left. Also when trying installing the driver, it says, "Please plug in Xonar Essence STX in audio device." D: Oh well if I can't get this working I'll go to the Creative card, I know for a fact when I had my Creative SB, it was working like a charm, but I needed the money so I returned it.
Thats the first thing you have to make sure you do. Asus cards need that power source plugged into them for them to be detected. Also make sure you have it into your pcie slot right.
Don't know man... I've put the power connector to the sound card in the first place, I switch PCI-E slots from one to another. Does it have to be specific spot? I remember having my old Creative Fatal1ty sound card on a PCI-E x16 slot and it work, this should be able to work the same right? Also, does it matter by operating system? (sounding noobish right now, its my frustration :bang::bang Reason being I said it might be the operating system is when I put the STX in another computer running XP, it detects it, at that moment I'm like WTF! I mean do I have to go back and run XP again to use this? or just a simple reformat because my $hit might be fu*cked up? Sorry guys, please bear with me.
yea you might have to format if it doesnt detect the card. yet another computer does. unless you have bad pcie slots.
Did you try letting Windows find a driver? Might need to do that first,then install audio card drivers.
Make sure the power connector is firmly seated into the soundcard. I had a minor issue installing my card, a couple of the power connectors would not fully go into the card, the third connector I tried did go all the way in. You should try different power connectors anyways, you might have a bad line. And you said it worked in another system, but I would take off the EMI shield anyways and make sure the OPAMPS are fully seated into the sockets by pressing down on them. I've worked with a couple Xonar Essence's now and each time, I discovered one or more OPAMPS were halfway out of their sockets, probably jarred loose from shipping.
This is what device manager says, When trying to install the drivers, it says I still have to connect the STX device to the PC D: I'm gonna try and reformat onto another hard drive.
