Holy crap! New Xonar DX 5.0 for $89!!

[NicePants42]

Looks like Asus is really looking to bring it - EAX 5.0 support and even the ability to simulate the location of player voices in multi-player games.

Dailytech link

Hope you're paying attention, Creative.

 

[Rob Williams]

We'll have a review of this card within the month. It looks VERY hopeful. It's essentially the Xonar D2/D2X without the bling (which might be fine for most people).

 

[Kougar]

No disrespect to Techgage, but The Tech Report just got an article up on this card. It looks very promising. I didn't even realize the original Xonar D2 lacks a front audio out header!

The Xonar's Oxygen HD audio chip wasn't designed for PCI Express, so Asus uses a bridge chip from PLX to adapt it to the PCIe interface. This bridge chip appears to conflict with motherboards based on Nvidia's latest nForce chipsets, though. We couldn't get the Xonar detected in a motherboard based on the nForce 790i SLI reference design, with the Vista device manager reporting problems with a PCI-to-PCI Express bridge. The same problem also afflicts the Xonar D2X, and according to Nvidia, it's a BIOS issue that will be resolved with an update shortly.

Something worth noting for those Nvidia chipset fans out there! good bit of luck the contest PC uses the original D2 I guess? Then again I wonder if ASUS already fixed this problem for their Striker II board...

 

[b1lk1]

Nvidia needs to stop producing chipsets with so many issues. It is hardly worth buying them when they all seem to conflict with something in a major way. 680i that hated quads and won't work with 45nm. 780i a 680i rehash. Now 790i having an issue like that. Nvidia really needs to start producing a quality chipset for Intel boards that work even half as good as Intel chipsets, especially since they continue to block SLI for ovbiously superior chipsets......

 

[Rob Williams]

No disrespect to Techgage, but The Tech Report just got an article up on this card. It looks very promising. I didn't even realize the original Xonar D2 lacks a front audio out header!

Something worth noting for those Nvidia chipset fans out there! good bit of luck the contest PC uses the original D2 I guess? Then again I wonder if ASUS already fixed this problem for their Striker II board...

No disrespect. Tech Report is one of the very few tech sites I actually read on a regular basis myself.

The DX looks incredible for the price-point. I am a bit worried about that 790i compatibility issue, though. You are right... I am very lucky that both the motherboard and sound card here for the contest PC should avoid that issue...

I'll also mention another thing I dislike about the PCI-E versions of the Xonar is that it requires a power cable, unlike the D2, which for some reason doesn't need additional power. Of course there is a reason, but it confused me when I first installed my D2X, as it's something out of the ordinary.

bl1k1... I have to agree. I seem to tout Intel often, but their chipsets are solid and I haven't run into an issue with them in recent memory.

I am not sure if this is a coincidence, but both 780i motherboards I've had here (ASUS P5N-T and Striker II Formula) have gone awry. The P5N-T worked at first, then it suddenly stopped booting. Then the Striker II Formula I had stopped saving BIOS settings.

Again, I am not sure if that's typical of 780i, but my luck has been horrible so far.

 

[Kougar]

Yeah. I don't like to seem anti-NVIDIA so I didn't outright say it, but they have had so many issues since 590. Why can't they learn and either design a good chipset, or better actually test & Q&A their design a much longer to iron out these bugs before releasing it? They are STILL having data corruption issues on 790 according to Anandtech. And then there was nForece4 with their hardware firewall that never got remotely fixed but they still advertise.

Some of the Wiki pages read like a NVIDIA fan's worst nightmare, nForce3 has memory allocation issues with Vista and ATI cards when using dual-core processors, so GPU acceleration is disabled. nForce4 has the firewall fiasco, data corruption issues with SATA II drives, and PCI bus issues because NVIDIA didn't follow the PCI specs right. I have to wonder if that was the problem with the PCIe Xonar.

Rob I am sure ya did, but you try the no battery / no AC power for an hour trick? One time it resurrected my non-booting P35-DQ6 I had, I'd managed to somehow trash the BIOS with extreme overclocking and the backup BIOS wasn't kicking in properly...