What's the Best Sound Card for Gaming?

Hi, of the three you listed I like the Asus ROG Xonar Phoebus. The Creative Sound Blaster ZxR is nice but of the two the Creative doesn't appear to have a front audio header. Meaning your headphones and mic would have to be connected at the rear of the case making you front audio panel useless.

Music lovers.

Do some research before throwing money away at sound cards, they are simply not what they are cracked up to be.

Ideally, all that you want to do is go with a digital output to a proper DAC that lives in a receiver or some other quality audio equipment. This is typically going to cost about the same as a good sound card, but will be of MUCH better quality.

If you are looking at a sound card for features rather than performance, then look into getting a software solution like the Sound Blaster xFi MB2 suite, which is cheap and offers that 'sound card sound' rather than flat digital audio.

The problem with sound cards is that computers throw out quite a bit of radiation that is picked up and amplified by the card. Going with a digital output to an external DAC just a few feet away will help you much more than any amount of shielding or processing that can be done on the card itself.

I understand the point you are trying to make but that comparison is apples to oranges. Integrated audio devices process 5.1 surround sound just as good as any discreet card these days. Most people buy discreet sound cards for added I/O capabilities. There was a time in PC land about ten years ago or so, where discreet audio cards were needed to offload CPU cycles as processing sound utilized up to 20% of your CPU cycles depending on your CPU. These days integrated audio devices may use 1-3% of your CPU or about the same as a discreet card.

Stereo headphone amplifier soundcards are a completely different beast all together.

I have the CM Storm Sirrus and it connects usb so I use my front panel usb ports to connect my headset. I have a Asus Xonar Dx 7.1 in one system and a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro in another and as Skit75 said integrated sound as advanced to the point where I really don't use them.

As luck would have it, Tom's put out a very interesting article today. I have not taken the time to read it yet, but I think it very much makes the same point I am trying to make here. Audio processing is audio processing. Be it done on the CPU, or integrated audio, or a dedicated sound card really does not make a whole hill of beans difference in the end. If the processing is all the same, then what matters is having the cleanest signal possible from the point you go analog, to the point the sound waves hit your ears. It is very much a war of attrition from the point that you convert to analog, until it hits your ears. Every step is guaranteed to loose fidelity in one way or another.

As an issue of practicality, this means getting your DAC (digital-to-analog converter) away from a EM noisy device like your computer. This DAC may be a simple $10-50 optical to RCA/headphone stereo device, which is becoming popular with gamers, but offers a great way to get stereo (or virtural 5.1) to your headphones with pretty good quality. These lack features, but can offer great quality at a very low price point. Some headphones even have the DAC and amp built into the headphones, so you entirely replace any need for a sound card at all as it is built into the headphones themselves. This obviously reduces any ability to do incremental upgrades, but it offers a nice all-in-one package that is easy to work with. I recently bought a Steelseries Siberia V2 USB headset which has an in-line USB sound card/dac which does a surprisingly decent job for a $10 DAC, there are surely better options on the market, but these are a good balance of being able to be used for gaming, music, videos, and yelling at friends online.
The other option (and what I personally do most of the time) is to get a receiver/amplifier that has a decent DAC built in which can then give you full 5.1 (or even 9.2) surround sound options. If buying new high-end equipment then this can get very expensive very quickly... thankfully you do not need new equipment to do this well, and old high end equipment looses value even faster than a car. You can easily get a good quality mid to high end 2-5 year old receiver for well under $200. If you are willing to look at garage sales and such then you can even find them for free. Then you simply get a decent set of headphones, or start building out your speaker set, and the sky is the limit for quality you can achieve. Having a fat receiver on your desk is not quite as sexy as a sound card (well... I guess that is a matter of opinion), but it allows you to break away from craptastic and limiting PC speakers, and use real home theater speakers (or if you are adventurous then you can build your own speakers) which often offer much more boom for your buck.


As for crashing in game being caused by the sound card... it is not unheard of... but I imagine you to be much more likely to win the lottery. Some older games (specifically LEGO games and other older cheap console ports) do have known issues, and you will have to dumb down your audio settings for the game to work properly, but this is often an issue of the program running at all... not an issue of it crashing once in game. Check your firmware and drivers for updates, and see if anyone else has similar issues using the same onboard audio chipset. Even if there is an issue, it is more likely a motherboard issue rather than being isolated to the onboard audio.