Hey everyone! Sorry for the lack of updates, I’ve been extremely busy recently and as you’ll soon realise, I wanted to fully investigate something before I wrote the next part which will cover DACs.
The main part of my DAC coverage was going to focus on internal sound cards (being the weapon of choice for most gamers), however I have been having some problems with my PC recently, with it randomly blue screening or crashing rather spectacularly in games (and only games). So I went about my normal testing of various components; I prime95′d my CPU + Memory for 24 hours, FurMark’d the GPU for 10 hours, ran hard drive stresss tests, all sorts and… nothing. Not a single thing failed, overheated or crashed. S**t.
So I started thinking about hardware changes that I’ve made recently and one in particular stood out; I installed a new sound card two weeks ago. So to test my theory I removed the sound card and revert back to my old one. Then I tried various games, running them for over 8 hours, each without a single crash. So I decided to do some more digging, I put the old one back in and tried again; a clean install if you like. Crash. Yep, within 2 hours of playing a game (the RIFT beta as it happens) the PC crashed. So I cleaned out the drivers and tried a “custom” set. Crash. By this point I’d pretty much had enough so I re-installed the old sound card and gave up.
After my testing everything leads me to believe that it was in fact the sound card that was causing the PC to blue screen / crash and as such I feel that I can no longer recommend this sound card or others in the same range.
What is the card you ask? An ASUS Xonar DG. The sound quality may be great and Dolby Headphone awesome, but if it causes BSODs it’s going back!
Which one worked, flawlessly each and everytime? A Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic.
6:00 pm, February 6, 2011Skyfire /
well this is a worrying development , if asus’s budget soundcards are going to cause bsods their reputation will crash . May i ask which gaems it crashed in or was it random ? i remember reading vista had a bad rep for killing soundcards so it may be your OS rather than the card itself causing the trouble.
7:14 pm, February 6, 2011Siyfion /
Well it’s Windows 7 and the games? Loads. Crashes occurred in Battlefield Bad Company 2, RIFT, Magica, League of Legends, Call of Duty, etc.. It wasn’t one in particular.
I believe the crashes may be related to the “GX” implementation of EAX, but then it still crashes on games without EAX. Not sure why, just annoyed that it does!
10:03 pm, February 6, 2011Skyfire /
hmm tricky , are there differnent modified drivers available for the DG ?
my Xonar DG will hopefully be turning up with my razers tomorrow
10:35 pm, February 6, 2011Siyfion /
Yeah, take a look here: http://brainbit.wordpress.com/category/uni-xonar/
I might give the Xonar another go, but with the GX setting disabled, to see if turning it off has any effect.
5:05 pm, February 28, 2011Brendan /
You should probably try even inexpensive external USB DAC’s such as the ones based on the Burr Brown PCM2702 chip. Especially if gaming with quality stereo headphones these will typically blow all the expensive internal sound cards out of the water.
6:10 pm, February 28, 2011Siyfion /
Yeah, I agree. For those that are interested, take a look at DACs like the Cambridge Audio DacMagic. However, these DACs have no support for dolby headphone or CMSS-3D, thus do not provide any sort of surround sound emulation. Thus, to achieve this they need to be hooked up to the PC via optical or coax with a pre-encoded dolby headphone stream; and to do that, you need a reasonably good internal sound card!