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Asus has a sound card in the works

D_o_S

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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.



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newtekie1

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Finally, something to put in those PCI-E x1 slots.:rockout:
 

jocksteeluk

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well i think it is about time Creative had a big time rival alternative and lets hope these asus products will deliver and force creative to lower its prices.
 

WarEagleAU

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Im just pleased as punch at this news. Im expecting to be getting one of these when they come out. Id like to test it against my Audigy 2 ZS :). Now...from the looks of the card, it looks like it would fit in the PCIe 8/16x slot. On another picture, it looks like it would fit into the PCIe 1/4x slot. Any idea which slot it would use? ID hate to give up my Crossfire just for a soundboard.
 

Rosco

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There is supposed to be a Standard PCI version, and a PCIe x1 Version
 
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now they just need to depricate the PCI slots and make them all PCIe slots...

video, sound, nic, hdd adapters all have PCIe now so no use for PCI now...
 

ktr

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That sound card feels like its gonna be kinda pricey...i bet its gonna be compared to the razar and the fatal1ty cards...
 

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Seeing as its coming in compared to the Xfi Gamer and music ones, Im betting between 70 and 200 usd
 
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The PCI slot is better for audio at the moment. That is because PCI sends a small ammount of large packets of information while PCIe send a large ammount of small packets of information. Audio does better with the former. So until audio needs more than 133MB/s, PCIe will be bottlenecking audio cards more than PCI.

In any case, I dont think ill ever need anything better than my Creative X-fi.
 

HaZe303

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The PCI slot is better for audio at the moment. That is because PCI sends a small ammount of large packets of information while PCIe send a large ammount of small packets of information. Audio does better with the former. So until audio needs more than 133MB/s, PCIe will be bottlenecking audio cards more than PCI.

In any case, I dont think ill ever need anything better than my Creative X-fi.

I agree with you to a point, but perhaps Asus atleast release´s drivers more frequent than Creative. I really hope Asus pulls this one off. Would be nice if Creative had competition, as it is now, Creative think they can behave the way they want. With little competition, they would need to get their act together again= better prices=better drivers=happy times... :)
 

OnBoard

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Creative's PCI-E 1x card was shown a long time ago and still no official news or buyable. Hope these come to market sooner, I just want an PCI-e soundcard to replace my Audigy 2 PCI which is blocking some airflow to my GPU (have PCI-e 1x slots on top of PCI-e 16x).
 
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The PCI slot is better for audio at the moment. That is because PCI sends a small ammount of large packets of information while PCIe send a large ammount of small packets of information. Audio does better with the former. So until audio needs more than 133MB/s, PCIe will be bottlenecking audio cards more than PCI.

In any case, I dont think ill ever need anything better than my Creative X-fi.

I would say for now I would think its overdoing it. But as we all know the upgrade from dvd to blu-ray or hd-dvd is the difference between video and sound only. An upgrade from 5.1 sound to 7.1 that means that audio is going to take up more and more volume. So that means that it would work better for "high definition" audio as compared to normal audio.

but I would still say its a good move in the right direction. Its just like when ISA slots were beginning to be deprecated... There were always good and bad things about the switch but in the end ISA is gone.

Bill Gates once said "640K ought to be enough for anybody." but as we can see thats not true...
 

randomperson21

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... why not have a godlike sound card that uses active cooling :roll:

ha dual crossfired soundcards! that would be amazing! and completely pointless


well, for this, i'd say take the age old route: wait for other people to buy it to see if its good. thats my plan :D
 
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maybe it will have an oc'able spu(sound processing unit) on it.
 

Rosco

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It's more likely thats its shielding, than active cooling...
 
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Here you are, pictures I took at CeBIT:

 
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