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Which is the better gaming sound card?

Forum CPU & Components : Sound Cards - Which is the better gaming sound card?

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NCCReliant   12-19-2008 at 04:35:30 PM

These are the two cards I'm looking at, and running Vista 64

ASUS Xonar D1
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6829132007

HT OMEGA STRIKER
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6829271001

I'm only concerned about it's gaming sound and performance, I don't care for music, HTPC, recording or any thing in relations to that.

The primary game this will be for is Lord of the Rings Online, with occasional CoD 4/5, Supreme Commander. I had enough of Creative, still getting BSoD after so patches, they never fixed this. I'm sick of the lack of Realtek support for the game, and they still only have a very old beta driver to restore 5.1 sounds, and the sounds are not stable, they keep peaking up on me, even when I turn the ingame sliders down.

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jay_l_a   12-19-2008 at 06:58:01 PM

I have a Striker connected to a 5.1 system, and I'm really happy with it.
The ASUS also receives good reviews, but I haven't heard it myself.

One strange thing I find with the Striker, is I have to open the sound utility and send a test sound to one of the rear speakers to 'initialize' the 5.1 sound. If I skip this step and go directly into a game, I only get 2 channel sound.
Crysis, HL2 and many others just would not be the same without hearing which direction the incoming fire is coming from.

I could never go back to 2 channel gaming sound.

------------------------------ GA-X38-DS4 (BIOS F3)||E8400 C2D (3.6GHz)||6Gb Crucial Ballistix DDR2-800 4-4-4-12||320Gb WD Caviar||2x 750Gb WD Caviar||Cooler Master Real Power Pro 750W||2x HD4870 512Mb(Crossfire)||HT Omega Striker 7.1
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antiacid   12-19-2008 at 07:01:33 PM

I assume you game with 5.1 speakers? In which case, i'd go for the Xonar if I had an extra floppy power connector.

In terms of FPS, benchmarks show the fatal1ty sound card to be better than all the other ones (by 1-5fps). The Xonar has the better sound quality, again according to benchmarks, but it is slightly less convenient to use because of that extra power cable requirement.

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