2013 - Is it worth it/ possible to find a decent gaming sound card?

[AngelicCore]

Hi,

I've had my trusty Audigy 2 ZS for over 7 years and i think it has payed for itself very well.

But since Vista removed DirectSound support and EAX is now no longer available in most games, I am not quite sure that Audigy would be better than the built in Realtek sound chip.

I've downloaded Creative Alchemy for the few games that it still supports but it is something like a headache to do all that just to have what you had in Windows XP.

Anyway, I am planning to build a Haswell gaming machine to replace my current PC. The though of a new sound card to replace my awesome ZS has passed my mind and after searching I didn't come to any conclusion about this.

Is it there a decent (and moderately priced) gaming sound card in 2013?
Is it worth it? I will be buying normal budgety 7.1 or 5.1 speakers (Creative or Genius or something like that, so no digital necessity)
Is it even worth it to use my Audigy 2 over the built in chip?


Thanks everyone for your patience.

 

[animal]

Unless you are looking to go fairly high mid-end or high-end ($100-$300) for a sound card, most mobos nowadays have pretty good on-board audio set-ups, and a few have some killer on-board audio.

 

[mauller07]

it will only improve your audio, no improvement in game performance as no hardware offloading is done anymore.

the asus xonar dgx is not a bad card and a decent improvment over onboard audio in a lot of cases and relatively cheap.

5.1 and has a headphone amp in the stereo ports or there is the slightly dearer dsx which has better surround quality but no headphone amp.

 

[cozmium]

Creative have fallen a long way since the early 2000's - I used to be a die hard Creative fan, way back since the original soudblaster/awe32 days, but their software got worse and worse - and for what, EAX? Nothing needs or uses it these days, and games generally process the sound how they want, rather than relying on the assumption that a user has to have a creative card.

I had endless problems with the simple premise of wanting to passthrough a digital signal to let an external decoder process it - the Audigy 2 I was using at the time insisted or making it utterly impossible unless I was in 'movie mode' in their bloated and unwieldy gui. Long story short, I since swapped to Asus Xonar devices in the last few years and they have been utterly flawless, i've not had any issues with any sort of signal I want to send anywhere. I would recommend any decent well-known brand before Creative.

If you're interested in surround gaming, something you won't find on most motherboards is on-the-fly encoding to Dolby/DTS - so you can use just the fibre optic/coax digital to hook up the surround system rather than use 3x analogue interconnects. Also in my experience, I have yet to find a motherboard that can even come anywhere near a mid-range+ dedicated soundcard. I use B&W speakers for my computer, and various motherboards over the years (even media-centric ones) have woefully bad on-board.

 

[AngelicCore]

it will only improve your audio, no improvement in game performance as no hardware offloading is done anymore.

the asus xonar dgx is not a bad card and a decent improvment over onboard audio in a lot of cases and relatively cheap.

5.1 and has a headphone amp in the stereo ports or there is the slightly dearer dsx which has better surround quality but no headphone amp.

I don't know, but a simple visual comparison between a card like that and my old card didn't really excite me.
I thought by now they should've made more strides in that field. Especially since the audigy wasn't the high end card of its time.


Xonar on newegg

5.1 Channels
24-bit 96KHz

Audigy on newegg
7.1 Channels
24-bit 192KHz

Of course looks and numbers are not the only thing but maybe I am just not very up to date with such things.

Creative have fallen a long way since the early 2000's - I used to be a die hard Creative fan, way back since the original soudblaster/awe32 days, but their software got worse and worse - and for what, EAX? Nothing needs or uses it these days, and games generally process the sound how they want, rather than relying on the assumption that a user has to have a creative card.

I had endless problems with the simple premise of wanting to passthrough a digital signal to let an external decoder process it - the Audigy 2 I was using at the time insisted or making it utterly impossible unless I was in 'movie mode' in their bloated and unwieldy gui. Long story short, I since swapped to Asus Xonar devices in the last few years and they have been utterly flawless, i've not had any issues with any sort of signal I want to send anywhere. I would recommend any decent well-known brand before Creative.

If you're interested in surround gaming, something you won't find on most motherboards is on-the-fly encoding to Dolby/DTS - so you can use just the fibre optic/coax digital to hook up the surround system rather than use 3x analogue interconnects. Also in my experience, I have yet to find a motherboard that can even come anywhere near a mid-range+ dedicated soundcard. I use B&W speakers for my computer, and various motherboards over the years (even media-centric ones) have woefully bad on-board.

I completely agree about creative and to add to what you've said, I am currently using custom drivers (danielk) for the Audigy because creative's driver support is just TERRIBLE..and that's even before Windows 8 was launched and them declaring audigy to be discontinued and refusing to develop drivers for it.

 

[mauller07]

yeah appearances are deceiving thought, especially with technology and circuit boards.

honestly for good sound quality you don't have to go expensive, also considering if your only getting a low - mid range pc surround kit to go with it a high end card would be wasted.

if you wanted to do that then get a midrange onkyo AV receiver and spend 500 - 1000 to buy an assortment of bookshelf and floorstanding speakers to go with it for 7.1.