I’m planning a new build here soon and would like to get a dedicated sound card for it, but I don’t really need the best, just something better than onboard. I’ve heard every opinion imaginable on every card I’ve considered, so I’m just going to narrow it down to the two cheapest: the Asus Xonar DX and the HT Omega Striker. I’m going to be using it for music and gaming with analog headphones. It seems like the Striker is a bit better for music, and the DX is a bit better for games, but since I’m gonna be doing both, I’m not sure which is the better choice. Is there any compelling reason to choose one over the other?
I use onboard, so maybe my opinion isn’t worth much, but I’ve never even heard of the HT Omega Striker. Asus Xonar on the other hand is a card I see a lot of people using.
I also use onboard, but my opinion is that onboard sound has gotten good enough to the point where it’s not really necessary to use a dedicated soundcard. I mean, my onboard even supports 5.1 surround.
Also you might want to see about upping your price range a bit, I don’t know exactly how it works with sound cards but going for the cheapest you can get with any other computer component will almost always end badly: you get what you pay for.
I’m not really all that qualified to say which cards are better than others but I bought this card just a bit ago and it’s really good as far as I can tell. It seems to be out of stock though, maybe I bought the last one :3 . Any card by them should be good as well though if you can’t find this one.
Edit: I see you have an HT Omega listed in the OP. I think the main difference is that the HT Omega does not have EAX, which is some sort of 3D sound thing, I really don’t know what it is. I’ve had no noticeable shortcomings to playing games with my HT Omega so I really couldn’t tell you. Although I have a 2.1 sound system so maybe it’s different with more speakers.
I’m using a Fiio E10 DAC/Amp combo. It sound amazing, and although it’s obviously better suited for music, it works fine for games too.
Link to review: https://www.head-fi.org/t/575084/impression-fiio-e10
Link to buy: https://mp4nation.net/catalog/fiio-e10-usb-dac-amp-96k24bit-p-653.html
Even though I use a g35 with build in sound card I have too say that nowadays most motherboards have quite good onboard cards, my asrock extreme 4 is thx certified and my gigaworks g500 sounded amazing on it, still might be better with a decent pci card.
I say you can always try the new gen onboard cards and if it doesn’t suffice buy a pci one later on.
Hmm, maybe I’ll just do this then. My old Realtek onboard audio from my GA-P35-DS3L was not bad, but not real good either, but that’s now a pretty old board. I see the Extreme 4 has the same audio chipset on it as the mobo I’m going to get, so maybe I’ll just wait and see for now. One of the things I wanted was to offload a bit of CPU load to the soundcard but with these i3s and i5s I’m not sure how big an issue it is anymore. And if I do get a card I’ll probably go with the Xonar. Thanks for the input guys.
I’d imagine the CPU load for sound on an onboard chip is close to nonexistent.
Yeah, I’ve heard that at most it might cause a 1-2 fps drop, which is well within acceptable bounds. I decided to just leave the sound card out of my order, so I’ll just try out my new motherboard’s onboard audio with a new pair of headphones instead, and see how that sounds first.
Just like it’s not really necessary to use anything besides onboard video…but don’t expect to play any game more complex than Solitaire with it. For someone who wants quality sound for both gaming and music, onboard shouldn’t be a consideration.
EAX has nothing to do with 3D sound - EAX = Environmental Audio Extensions, it’s a technology which allows sound hardware to more accurately recreate certain environmental ambiance, via signal processing and support for multiple voices at once (i.e. having a character talking, birds chirping, wind blowing, etc, all simultaneously - not all hardware can support many distinct sound sources at once). EAX isn’t as important as it used to be, since game designers have started coding their own sound processing engines that bypass what EAX can do, but it has its place.
You’re talking maybe 1-2% CPU utilization if you’re using 100% of the soundcard, so its extremely negligible. See below about the Xonar.
I have the Asus P6X58D-E motherboard which has a Realtek ALC889 on it, and I also have the [COLOR=‘DeepSkyBlue’]Asus Xonar DX. I assure you, there is an extraordinary difference for both music and games between the two boards. I highly recommend the Unidrivers if you get the Xonar - really improves the options and from what I understand, fixes some processing issues that affect certain games (that is, it’s a Windows problem but the modified drivers workaround it, etc).
Considering I got the Xonar over a year ago, and it was $60 after MIR, and it’s around $70 from what I see now, I’d say to get it. Just as an experiment, I switch to the Realtek for about a month, then back to the Xonar and my ears were like, “Why did you torture us for a month?!”
$.02 
Thanks for your reply, Batz. Good to get the opinion of someone who owns the product. Like I said, I’m not a huge audiophile, but I do like to have a certain level of audio quality, and I know sound cards have improved my experience in the past. However, this is a new onboard chip I haven’t tried before. If the ALC892 that my board comes with sounds pretty good, I’ll be happy. If I find it’s lacking, I’ll definitely pick up the Xonar DX.
Yeah, I had heard that EAX was becoming less and less relevant as time goes on so I didn’t worry about the sound card supporting it or not.
I’d have liked a card that supported EAX just to get a bit more from my older games, but idk if it’s worth it. The Xonar looks good though, I forgot about it. I should check it out.