2010-09-17, 02:34 AM
Jamie_Kurosawa Wrote:They only have the Xonar DG in PCI? The Xonar DX supports DTS and 3D audio for Headphones. I'd rather have a PCIe audio card for one reason... PCI sound cards have some very strange problems due to the PCI bus being shared with other PCI slots in many designs. Most had a seperate shared PCI slot for this which also ran the audio codec modem and the onboard audio as well, but not all of them. Good thing about PCIe is everything has it's own dedicated data bus with the chipset and nothing is shared around. The DG seems like a lower end audio card as well.
The DG is launching at >$40-45 Its targeted towards gamers and or audiophiles that have >300 ohm headphones. If you've noticed, there aren't any cards that feature headphones amps sub $200
Most decent/expensive pairs of headphones need to be powered/driven. If we were to run a pair of 250 ohm Beyerdynamic DT 770's though a standard DX/D1, it would honestly sound worse than if it was driven through the Xonar DG. If you had a separate external headphone amp then of course the DX/D1 would be superior.
The only problem with the DX is that the PCI-E x1 bus cannot power the card alone. It requires you to plug it in to the power supply while the standard D1 PCI version receives power though the motherboard.