PCI Express has been around for a long time, yet very few add in cards have adapted to this interface - many still use plain old PCI, which has caused many motherboard manufacturers to trade off PCIE slots for PCI slots.

Asus is about to change that, being among the few producing a PCI Express sound card. The ultra high fidelity sound card will have 118dB SNR playback and 115dB SNR recording capabilities. Instead of EAX, the card will support Dolby and DTS technologies. Asus claims that this will be useful, as games for consoles natively support these standards. When being ported to the PC platform, no additional coding will be necessary.

The card incorporates many of the features we have seen before on soundcards from other companies, especially those based around the CMedia Oxygen HD audio processor. The features include Dolby Headphone, Dolby Pro Logic IIx, Dolby Virtual Speaker, Dolby Digtal Live, DTS NEO:PC, DTS:Connect and DTS:Interactive.

However, rather than going down the third party audio chip route, Asus decided to develop its own entirely customised audio processing chip in its own labs and have spec'd out the soundcard with ultra high end OpAMPs, DACs and ADCs. The company even included an EMI shield covering because the internals of a PC case are renowned for being a hive for RFI.

The cards should be available for a similar price as Creative's X-Fi Extreme Gamer cards.