Just upgraded from onboard Realtek sound card to an Asus Xonar DSX as Overclockers had it for £29.99 on their This Week Only deals. Fired up BF4 for a few rounds and can't believe the difference. Sound is clearer, more depth and bass. Well worth the £30.
I can't tell the difference between the onboard sound and the X-Fi card that I added, but that may be due to my headphones. With your newfound audio prowess, do you feel more immersed in the gaming experience?
Yes, I do. Footsteps are clearer, gunfire and explosions sound much better. Overall, it's a much better experience.
I have the Creative Gamer x-fi card, but i think it's a bit long in the tooth now. MiNi has a xonar and it's sound seems a lot cleaner and crisp, may be time to invest in a new sound card., and a move away from Creatives Sound Blasters
I'm like Saundie. It's more to do with the headset amp. You can get the same levels by just tweaking settings. I notice a difference using differing headsets and speakers but not with sound cards now.
as sexy says diffrent head sets have different characteristics and the kaves have both the sound card settings and the kaves onboard amp and control panels settings affecting it also creative seems to specialize in speakers setups and audio creation more over xonars gamin profiles
Plantronics make some of the best budget headsets out there. There is a lot of snakeoil in the PC audio market now.
I don't know much about the whole sound scene, but all I know is that I'm using the same headset with a different sound card and the sound quality is a hell of a lot better. I haven't changed any default sound settings either.
Got one of these after seeing GFiSH post - thanks buddy - and finally had some to time to put it in yesterday. Unfortunately my stupidly designed Gigabyte motherboard helpfully has capacitors at the edge of the board behind the PCIE socket, which stops the card fitting into it all the way, because of the bracket holder, so two top tips: 1) Check the socket is clear, before buying anything - doh ! and 2) Don't buy stupid Gigabyte motherboards. It does have two PCIE sockets, oh problem solved you might think, nope, the second has a giant heat sink in front of it - insert annoyed rant, etc. Oh, and the BIOS configuration is annoying too ! I may just have to get a replacement motherboard, memory and a lovely shiny i5/7 CPU now - sigh
I couldn't get to the smaller PCI-E (x4?) sockets on my ASRock motherboard so used the bigger PCI-E socket normally used for a second graphics card. Works fine. I might be able to move it now I've swapped graphics cards as the old R9 280X covered 3 slots but the new GTX780 only covers 2.
