Support for ASUS XONAR Essence ST/STX Sound Card

[ngoodacre]

I want to buy an ASUS Xonar Essence ST/or STX sound card for my HP Z420 desktop but I am hesitating. Several years ago, 2013 I think, there were a few posts in this and other forums to the effect that ASUS were no longer providing driver support for this card, but this post appeared in this forum:

"As of April 4, 2013, Asus provided a new update. go get PCI_STX_8_0_8_1818_Win8 and install. All now works well! "

Does anyone know if this turned out to be right at that time, and if so is it still true?

People will say that sound support is provided satisfactorily nowadays by circuitry on the mother board, but I have been a hifi enthusiast long enough to doubt that.

 

[gamerk316]

While ASUS driver drops tend to be few and far between, I never had much of a problem with a similar but much less supported card (The ASUS Xonar Xense). To the best of my knowledge, their driver drops work fine on Windows 10. Even if the official driver has issues, I know there are third party drivers (Unified Xonar Drivers) that basically take the latest C-Media drivers (all ASUS cards use C-Media chipsets) and allow them to be used with ASUS cards.

 

[ngoodacre]

Thank-you gamerk316,

Your news about the 3rd part drivers is very interesting, and I went to the ASUS site a day ago and found a download list for support of the Essence - for a whole lot of O/S's. I f the official one from ASUS turns out to be dodgy its good to know that there is an alternative.

 

[gamerk316]

Thank-you gamerk316,

Your news about the 3rd part drivers is very interesting, and I went to the ASUS site a day ago and found a download list for support of the Essence - for a whole lot of O/S's. I f the official one from ASUS turns out to be dodgy its good to know that there is an alternative.

Depending on which one you get, the most common failure I know of is the molex power connector (if required) not being plugged in all the way, preventing the drivers from installing. The cards tend to be rock-solid aside from that.

I've personally never had a problem with the official drivers; they do what is required of them. Not as feature rich as Creative's offerings, but at least they NEVER crash.