Like the floppy drive before it, many have claimed the final death knell of the Sound Card is just around the corner. While the floppy drive has mostly disappeared, Sound Cards are still around. Most of them are flying the colours of Creative. However with the era of high definition content and surround gaming Sound Cards are enjoying a small renaissance, and with companies like ASUS throwing their hat into the ring Creative is left counting it’s cards.
The Xonar D2X sound card from ASUS is their top line sound card. Based of the design of the D2, the D2X is out with the old and in with the new. ASUS has updated some of the components on the board, and changed the interface. The AV200 HD audio processor is still there, which means that this card supports most every audio acronym under the sun. However the D2X uses the PCI Express bus, which is a huge differentiation from the many other PCI based cards on the market. Here’s a quick overview of the features offered on the Xonar D2X. A full explanation of these quick points can be found on the product home page.
- Solution to Windows Vista Gaming Audio Problems
- Cleanest Voice in Online or LAN Game Chatting
- Unparalleled Sound Clarity
- Dolby and DTS for Complete Digital Home Experience
- Backup Digital Music Files and Enjoy Them On-the-Go
- Stylish Audio Processor with EAX Support
- High Quality Headphone Amplifier for Audio Listening Pleasure
- Precise 3D positioning Technologies from Dolby Studio
- Background noise cancelling by advanced Array Mic Technology
- S/PDIF output with Dolby Digital encoding easily turns NB/PC into HTPC
The specifications are just as good, or in some cases better, then the best from Creative. The signal to noise ratio is a few decibels higher, which means audio from the ASUS card should be clearer with less static. The EMI shield is a nice touch. To top it off the ASUS card has one thing that Creative can’t seem to do; be compatible with Vista.
With all these added features, you would expect the price of the Asus Xonar D2X sound card to be higher than average. I wish I couldn’t say that wasn’t the case, but when it comes to street price the D2X sits on the high end of the scale at about $200 USD. That’s nearly the same price as Creative’s top internal sound card offering. So at that price does it do better than Creative? And are all the bells and whistles worth the price of admission? We’ll have to find out.
The Card
The ASUS Xonar D2X sound card is a x1 PCI express card; one of only a few available on the market. The card itself isn’t just bare circuits. Asus has installed an EMI shield in the hopes of blocking any EMI radiation that may affect sound quality. The centre of the EMI shield has an LED backlight which lights up with an orange glow when the card is powered up.
The rear of the card sports a large array of ports. This allows the Xonar D2X to support a myriad of devices and configurations. The full list of ports, from left to right, reads as follows.
- Microphone
- Line Input
- Headphone / Front Output
- Side Surround Output
- Centre / Subwoofer
- Rear / Back Surround Output
- S/PDIF Input
- S/PDIF Output
That means that not only is this card fully capable of 7.1 surround sound, but it also can input and output S/PDIF on both coaxial and digital. This makes it a great candidate for installation in a home theatre PC, as it can be the central hub for many different components.
As I mentioned earlier, this Xonar D2X connects to your motherboard by way of a x1 PCI express connector. This card is one of only a few PCIe sound cards on the market. The choice of this connector ensures the card is somewhat future proof. The only downside is that some motherboards place the x1 PCIe slots in some precarious places, like between video cards or next to power supplies. Speaking of power supplies, there is one more downside with the Xonar D2X.
Because the PCIe bus doesn’t provide the same amount of power available over the PCI bus, the Xonar D2X needs an additional power source. This comes in the form of a floppy power connector. No adapter is included with the card to adapt a standard Molex connector, which might cause an issue for some users as some power supplies only come with one floppy connector. If you have a modular power supply you might be using an entire power cable just for the sound card, as many modern systems don’t have any components in them that use Molex connectors. External power is a requirement, but a standard Molex connector would have been preferred.
While on the topic of connectors, it should be noted that the Asus Xonar D2X doesn’t have a header for front panel audio. This makes it necessary to reach around the back of your system should you want to switch to headphones.
The positioning of the Asus Xonar D2X on your motherboard shouldn’t matter, as Asus has placed a metal plate on the sound card that they claim will act as an EMI shield and as mentioned earlier, the ring around the shield gives us a bit of an orange light show when armed.
Some Included Accessories
For your $200 you do get more then just a sound card. Asus has included a great deal of accessories with the Xonar D2X. They covered all the bases for this card, making it a good candidate for a content creation system, gaming rig, or HTPC.
The Xonar D2X is actually a 2-slot card, in that it has an add-on that takes up an additional expansion slot on the back of your computer. That extension is a full MIDI port, which is connected to one of the ports on the top edge of the card. The port is optional to install, but this is great for professional music producers who need a decent sound card for their content creation systems at a reasonable price.
To serve those looking for a good HTPC sound card, ASUS includes a nice amount of cables with the Xonar D2X. Of those cables, the best inclusion is that of an optical TOSLINK cable to transmit digital audio signals from this card to your home theatre system. Though the S/PDIF ports on the sound card look to be Coaxial, they are actually dual mode and support optical connections as well. To support the full size TOSLINK connector ASUS has included adapters for those ports. ASUS also included several analogue 3.5mm to RCA cables, to facilitate analogue surround sound systems. This means you can hook up this sound card to a 7.1 channel receiver in both analogue and digital.
Installation or Ooh Pretty Lights
Installation of the ASUS Xonar D2X was fairly uneventful, especially is you are experienced in installing expansion cards such as this. The manual included only covered the basics of installing an Asus sound card, and actually showed instructions for the PCI version of this card. The only issue I had was locating a floppy power connector. Space in pretty tight in my case of choice, and I had to do a little rewiring to get the appropriate power connector to the proper slot. But once everything was connected and turned on, I treated to quite the light show.
Unfortunately I was unable to get a really good picture of the main lighting on the Xonar D2X, due to it’s position in my case. However you can still get an idea of the light cast by the orange ring on the EMI shield. It even lights up the motherboard around the PCIe socket.
As for the ports on the rear of the card, I was able to get quite a good picture of it. The LEDs used in this installation are quite bright, and lit up the wall behind my case with a fair degree of vibrancy. As for the colouring, they follow the AC97 specification, which makes for both a cool effect and a handy way to find the port you are looking for when connecting stuff behind there.
Driver installation went off without a hitch. ASUS’ drivers disk is fully automated, and took care of everything needed to use all the features on the Xonar D2X. There were several other CDs that were included, but we didn’t really bother with them. However we do need to take a look at the software package, as it’s rather in depth.
Software
ASUS includes a lot of software with the Xonar D2X. There is of course the drivers and software needed to run the sound card, and that’s what we are primarily focusing on. However there is much more here; most of it suiting content creation and entertainment applications. The two biggest inclusions are that of the Cakewalk Production Plus Pack, and Ableton Live. Both of these applications are well known tools for music production and creation. Beyond that Power DVD is included, as is the RMAA (RightMark Audio Analyzer) suite, which is used for testing audio fidelity and performance. We also used this app for testing.
Once installed, the Xonar D2X Audio Center is where all the action is. From here you can control every aspect of the sound card, including effects, speaker control, volume, and much more. Unfortunately the interface is a little iffy. It has a lot of flash on the surface, but the buttons are a bit small, touchy, and confusing. It took a bit of trial and error, and some checking on the Asus forums, to get a real handle on the control panel.
ASUS PMP is the other program included with the main package of drivers and utilities. It’s a media player and conversion program of very limited ability. Out of the box (or paper sleeve as it were) it only supports ripping music to WMA at 128Kbps, 192Kbps, and 320Kbps. MP3 support is only added after a third party codec is installed. Asus ducks licensing fees by doing this, but does create some inconvenience for the user. In the end I didn’t pay much attention to PMP because (1) I use far better CD ripping software in the form of EAC and LAME, and (2) most of the functionality in this program already comes in Windows Media Player. I’m definitely not advocating the use of WMP, just pointing it out.
Test Setup
Testing a sound card is always an interesting proposition. Unlike video cards and processors, which produce measurable and differentiating results, sound quality can be much more subjective. There are empirical ways of conclusively measuring the features and performance of a sound card in a test environment, but no one listens to sound in a test environment using test tones. That’s where games like F.E.A.R. come in, as well as watching a couple movies, and listening to some music. Here’s the rig we used to test everything out.
- AMD Phenom 9600 Black Edition 2.3GHz Quad Core CPU
- Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe/WiFi-AP 790FX Motherboard
- OCZ Platinum XTC REV.2 PC2-6400 2GB 2X1GB DDR2-800 Memory Kit
- Foxconn 9800GTX-512N Extreme OC Video Card
- Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.10 16MB SATA2 Hard Drive
- Cooler Master Hyper 212 CPU Cooler
- Antec P182 Advanced Super Mid Tower Case
- Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W Power Supply
To give a sense of what this card is capable of, we pitted it up against the onboard sound on our test motherboard. The reason for this is two-fold, as both audio quality and performance can be affected by onboard audio. All the electrical noise on a typical motherboard can really monkey with both aspects.
Rightmark Audio Analyzer
First up in testing was the afore mentioned RMAA, which is also know as Rightmark. This program uses a series of test tones to poke and prod at your sound system, eventually finding it’s weaknesses. For the purposes of this review, we focused squarely on the Noise Level and TMD results, and used the default settings in the test program.
The noise level tests check the clarity of the sound, and how much static is present in the signal. This can be affected by such things as lots of EMI around the sound card, and is analogous to the SNR rating given by the manufacturer. With that in mind, it’s not a surprise that a discrete sound card like the ASUS Xonar D2X surpasses any onboard solution. Now some might be wondering why the result doesn’t match the SNR rating of the card. The reason for this is because we are using the default test tone with RMAA. If you use a test tone with a higher sampling rate, the results scale accordingly. Either way, the Asus Xonar D2X wins in this area.
Total Harmonic Distortion rates the quality of the sound after it’s been passed through the parts on the sound card. Basically this gives a good indicator of the quality of the sound card. Once again it’s no surprise that the ASUS Xonar D2X destroys the onboard solution in this arena. Knowing this, I quickly ran a benchmark run on the AuzenTech X-Fi prelude and found that it also trailed the D2X, although only by a couple decibels. ASUS’ solution is definitely looking promising. Hopefully these results translate into real use.
Real World Testing
Synthetic tests are all fine and dandy, but when it comes down to it audio must be experienced to be rated. To test the audio qualities of both the Onboard sound and the Asus Xonar D2X, I played a few games, watched a couple key movie scenes, and played through some of my musical favourites. First off, let’s start with gaming.
F.E.A.R. is a game where positional audio counts. In this paranormal tactical FPS game, you are seeking out and and attempting to contain a paranormal menace of some type. In a game like this, positional audio will both set the tone of the experience and tell you where the threat is coming from. In the past, I’ve been frustrated by many Onboard audio solutions not providing the best surround experience. With the use of a sound card like the ASUS Xonar D2X, the positional audio was superb. It also performs way better than onboard audio in terms of resources by giving us a nice performance increase in frames per second.
Unfortunately that performance increase was short lived. Once EAX was enabled on our Vista box, and the card was utilizing the DS3D GX feature implemented by Asus to facilitate DirectSound and EAX calls, the performance dropped and the CPU usage spiked. It still bettered the onboard solution, but only by 2 or 3 FPS which makes turning it on a no brainer.
Curious as to whether this was limited to F.E.A.R. and EAX, I loaded up Team Fortress 2. TF2 uses a different method for its 3D environment. As for the effect on performance, it increased as I moved off of EAX onto a game more compliant with Vista. That being said, EAX support for this card on Vista is much better than on Creative’s X-Fi drivers. That’s where the ASUS Xonar D2X shines. This card best serves Windows Vista users as it actually brings a “works with everything” approach to EAX and Microsoft’s newest OS. The X-Fi chip does offer better performance overall, and supports EAX Advanced HD, but the ASUS board actually works under Vista with little issue.
Movies and Music
Results in gaming may only be moderate, but movies and music is where the D2X really shines. The Dolby Digital and DTS support doesn’t disappoint, and when hooked up to a decent amp and speakers produces a wonderful audio experience. Should you encounter a movie with only stereo sound, the myriad of virtual speaker options will help you reproduce a very good facsimile of proper surround sound.
Using the same virtual speaker options to upmix music was a little more hit and miss. That isn’t suprising, as upmixing music, be it CD or MP3, can produce interesting results. Some genres sound fine, while others just don’t sound right. Personally I prefer to just run my music in stereo and in that area the Xonar D2X performs as well as can be expected from a discrete sound card. Even thought the virtual speaker settings may not be the best, you can still tweak your music settings to what is the best sound with the features in the sound card’s control panel. In the end, this card is definitely suited more towards entertainment then gaming.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion
Across the board, the sound quality produced by the Xonar D2X is quite excellent. In movies and music, the output is clear and crisp. The added Dolby and DTS features make for an even better movie watching experience, and music is helped along nicely by some of the audio tweaks offered in the control panel. Gaming was also a treat with this card, and if you are running Vista this is pretty much the best card to use.
While this card sounds sublime in games, it still causes a performance hit when using EAX. The D2X also doesn’t support EAX Advanced HD, which may or may not make a difference to you depending on your application. And when it comes to applications, the package included is deep, but the software included by ASUS themselves comes up short. The control panel for the sound card needs some usability tweaks, and the PMP ripper needs to be upgraded or dropped altogether.
Then there’s the issue of the floppy power connector. To hook up this sound card in my system, I first had to locate a cord for my modular power supply that had such a connector on it. I then had to completely undo and redo my cabling job for everything to be kosher. The severe lack of use of the floppy power connector means it’s slowly being phased out. Some power supplies don’t even have them. This could have been rectified simply by including a Molex to floppy adapter, or just using a standard Molex connector.
This card is a jack of all trades, and a master of only a few. Those who should consider this card will be those looking for a solution for their HTPC or content creation rig, or those gamers running Vista. All others can still find decent cards in Creative’s stable. This card still comes in as recommended from those of us at Futurelooks though. It just sounds too good, and has too many good features.
Pros
- Sounds wonderful
- Easily trumps onboard sound, and best X-Fi in some areas
- Excellent accessories and software package
- Vista compatible with all features available
- Oh, pretty lights
Cons
- Performance hit with EAX
- Software needs some tweaking
- Floppy power connector used for external power
- No front panel output for caes
- Still can’t best X-Fi in some important areas
Overall Rating: 8.0/10.0
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