[SOLVED] AUDIO: XONAR DGX vs ALC 1200?

[Quanticriver]

Hello everyone

I have been gifted an old Xonar DGX and i was wondering if it would make sense to use that instead of my onboard audio

My mobo: B550 Gigabyte aorus elite with ALC 1200
Or the Xonar with an Oxygen CMI 8786 audio processor

I use the pc for gaming , and I use a steelseries artic 7 (headphones)

All opinions are appreciated

 

[Lafong]

wondering if it would make sense

Your own ears is far and away a better test than any opinion could possibly be.

It may sound different, but not necessarily better.

The human memory for the nuances of sound is poor, so ideally you'd do a test where you can make a quick A versus B comparison.

Try desperately to ignore the placebo effect.

 

[Karadjgne]

The Arctis 7's are nice. I've had a pair for a couple years, all I use when gaming. Recently moved from lga1155 to X570 so moved from ALC 8xx to ALC 11xx.

Couldn't tell any difference in sound. It's a low level output via USB to broadcast.

The Xonar would be great if using a DAC and decent speaker system, or audiophile quality wired headphones since then the output is from the card itself, but since it's just a USB port the on board audio is intrinsically the same.

 

[Corwin65]

Once you introduce a USB headset, which has it's own "soundcard" built in, the discreet or on-board sound is irrelevant.

 

[Quanticriver]

Once you introduce a USB headset, which has it's own "soundcard" built in, the discreet or on-board sound is irrelevant.

The headset uses a minijack connection

 

[hotaru.hino]

I'm inclined to lean more on the Realtek chip on the basis that:

• It's a higher end Realtek chip, so quality wise you're not going to really notice a difference between it and a "audiophile grade" sound card from what back when
• The DGX is no longer supported. It might be fine to use the card simply to output sound, but if you wanted to take advantage of any of its additional features, they may not work.

But of course, nothing really beats a comparison. You can have both the Realtek and Xonar DGX in use in Windows, you just have to switch the output in Settings when you want to do a comparison.

 

[gamerk316]

I'm inclined to lean more on the Realtek chip on the basis that:

• It's a higher end Realtek chip, so quality wise you're not going to really notice a difference between it and a "audiophile grade" sound card from what back when
• The DGX is no longer supported. It might be fine to use the card simply to output sound, but if you wanted to take advantage of any of its additional features, they may not work.

But of course, nothing really beats a comparison. You can have both the Realtek and Xonar DGX in use in Windows, you just have to switch the output in Settings when you want to do a comparison.

I'm reasonably sure the old Win7 drivers still work for it; worse case you can give the generic C-Media driver package a shot.

The DXG is/was an excellent low budget option for those who needed a headphone amp to drive their headphones properly. At least when it came out it was better then what Realtek had; can't really comment on Realteks newer stuff. I'd suspect differences in quality would be hard to hear, it would be more of a preference to the specific signature for each device more then anything else.

I'd say plug it in and give it a shot; worst case you can just disable it.

Note I've used Xonar's before (Xense) it it played well with Realtek drivers; never really had a conflict between the two. You may want to initially disable the Realtek, but that's up to you.

 

[Quanticriver]

thanks everyone for your time and replies, i have decided to gift it to my sister who rocks a i7 2600 with lga 1155 mobo for making music

ill stick to realtek