« Posts tagged ASUS

Perhaps I was a bit quick to jump the gun…?

February 6, 2011 / posted in Audio, Gaming / 2 Comments

After discussing the issues that I’ve been having with the ASUS Xonar DG causing general system instability, I have now heard from various sources that it could be the “GX” feature of the card causing the problem.

The GX mode is ASUS’ attempt to emulate EAX (Creative’s surround sound engine) so that older games written using it can still have surround sound. What they don’t seem to tell you is that it might cause all kinds of system lock-ups depending what games you play, etc.

As such, I feel that I perhaps should give the Xonar another go, this time with the GX mode permanently set to off. If this cures the stability issues, then I will happily recommend the cards again, with the proviso that GX mode should be always off. Especially considering that almost all games released these days are not coded with EAX and so gain no benefit from GX mode.

Is audiophile headphone gaming possible? (Part 3.5)

February 6, 2011 / posted in Audio, Gaming / 6 Comments

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.

Is audiophile headphone gaming possible? (Part 1)

January 26, 2011 / posted in Audio, Gaming / 5 Comments

This quest of mine all started when I decided that I wanted some new headphones for gaming on my PC as I found my current set (Roccat Kaves) a little too heavy and uncomfortable after extended playtime. I started looking around online in the usual places (Overclockers UK) and found that they had a decent selection of gaming headsets, then my head started to hurt.

There were headsets which had USB connections, a single 3.5mm connection, a full 3 x 3.5mm connections, stereo headphones, “hardware” 5.1 headphones, “virtual” 5.1 headphones, “virtual” 7.1 headphones… My god, I think my head exploded.

After spending some time collecting the pieces of brain-matter from around my room I decided that I needed some help, so I decided to do some research. Here’s a summary of what I found:

Firstly, all sound produced by your games / music is digital (unless you’ve got a PCI record player!?) so at some point that digital signal needs to be processed and converted into an analogue signal. This needs to happen because speakers and headphones are both analogue devices, they don’t read 1′s and 0′s, they need a waveform.

So your game produces some digital gunfire, this then gets passed on to your sound card (assuming you have one, if not it’s probably passed to an on-board audio chip) to deal with. At this point your sound card can do one of three things:

  1. Convert the digital signal into an analogue waveform and output it via the 3.5mm jacks.
  2. Leave the digital signal alone and output whatever it can digitally over an optical/coax link.
  3. Encode the digital signal into a Dolby format (such as Dolby Digital) and output it over the optical/coax.

Of these options I imagine 99.999% of PC users fall into category 1. Using this option means that your sound card is working as a DAC (Digital-to-Analogue Converter) which has some drawbacks; you are totally dependant on the quality of your sound card’s conversion for the quality of sound you get out from it. If you’ve got a good sound card (such as a Creative X-Fi or Asus Xonar) then the conversion should be pretty good, but if you’re using an on-board audio chip the quality of the conversion can be awful. Even the good sound cards aren’t considered “great” because of the limitations they have to work with; being inside a computer is inherently a very noisy place (electrically speaking), with a lot of EMI flying about.

Option 2 sounds like a reasonable one, until you factor in that unless audio is encoded in a major format (ie. Dolby Digital) the optical standard only allows 2-channel sound to be sent un-encoded through it. That means that all of the digital information that was meant for the side, rear, centre and bass speakers is effectively lost. Eak! Obviously this isn’t a very good set-up for gaming as you want to be able to hear what’s going on behind you and those ear-trembling bass notes.

Option 3 requires you to have a sound-card that is capable of encoding to a major format on-the-fly. Generally, this means that the sound card will need to be a higher end model. This option allows all of the digital channels to be output over the optical/coax connection.

However, both option 2 and 3 simply “pass-the-buck” as it were; the digital signal still needs to be converted, it’s just that the sound card isn’t the one that ends up doing it. This has some advantages and disadvantages, which I’ll come to later on in this series.

Click here for Part 2