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Asus Xonar D2X

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:23:19 -0500

Much has been made of the incredible speed advantages PCI Express offers over PCI. Beyond GPUs, however, we haven’t found much worthy of occupying those slots. Asus hopes to change that with its Xonar D2X card—the first soundcard we’ve reviewed that makes use of the PCI Express interface. The D2X is basically a PCI-E version of the Xonar D2 (reviewed April 2008). In our review of the Xonar D2 we lamented the card’s lack of advanced EAX support, something Asus has tried to fix here. But do their workarounds, well, work?

Asus Xonar D2

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:16:09 -0600

Who’d have thunk it? Long considered a dead zone, soundcards are making a resurgence. Driven by an outcry for audio that doesn’t sound like a box of snap, crackle, pop every time you access your USB ports, manufacturers are releasing new soundcards that surpass the free audio that comes with your motherboard. This month, we test an Auzentech card that uses a Creative Labs chip and Asus’s new entry into PC audio.

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Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1

Gordon Mah Ung — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:47:30 -0600

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Creative Xmod

Michael Brown — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 19:14:41 -0500

Being audio purists, we typically piss on products that sit in the midst of an audio stream and manipulate what the artist intended to create. But when listening to music played through Creative’s X-Fi soundcards, we’ve increasingly found ourselves turning on the 24-bit Crystalizer—and liking it!

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Creative Labs X-Fi Xtremegamer Fatal1ty Pro

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 09 May 2007 19:20:35 -0500

If you read our original review of the X-Fi way back in November 2005, you already know about this card. Back then, Creative packaged this exact same card with a drive bay and remote and charged an impossible to justify $280 for the X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS soundcard.

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Razer Barracuda AC-1

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 09 May 2007 18:42:11 -0500

As we said with the Auzentech, we’re impressed when companies go above and beyond reference designs for products. Razer’s Barracuda AC-1 is such a product. Though it uses the same C-Media Oxygen HD chip as the X-Meridian, you wouldn’t think the two cards were related.

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Auzentech Auzen X-Meridian 7.1

Gordon Mah Ung — Wed, 09 May 2007 17:43:24 -0500

Soundcards, like videocards, tend to have cookie-cutter designs; products that use the same chipsets look virtually the same.

That wasn’t the approach Auzentech took when it put down the traces for its Auzen X-Meridian 7.1 card. Auzentech says it carefully crafted a custom PCB and added components to get the best possible audio from the card, which is based on C-Media’s top-shelf CMI8788 Oxygen HD “audio processor.” We believe it, too. The board’s traces, layout, and components are vastly different than those of the Razer AC-1 soundcard, which also uses the CMI 8788 Oxygen HD chip.

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Philips amBX Gaming Peripherals

Michael Brown — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 14:43:45 -0500

We’ll try anything that immerses us more deeply in a game. We dig hardware that breaks down the barriers between a fantasy universe and our everyday real world. But we had to suppress a giggle when Philips first demonstrated its amBX system of colored lights, whirring fans, and vibrating wrist pads.

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