Xonar Essence STX: Sneak Peek! - Page 27

Its a 1/4" jack not a 1/8" (mini)

The RCA is a lineout so you really really shouldn't do headphones out of it. Its meant for speakers or a separate amp.

AAAARRRRGGGGHHH!!!!! Every time I try to start FEAR multiplayer (favorite game)I crash\restart to a blue screen and can just barely make out the words memory dump before it restarts. Please Asus make a new driver ASAP! This thing sounds freakin awesome but even the emu 0404 usb I tried out yesterday could run FEAR. Gimme a break already.

Someone on audioasylum has had success using this linear power supply with the Xonar D2X
Jameco Electronics Power Supplies & Wall Adapters: REGAL ELECTRONICS, INC: RJM551228

Man.. I just checked it out, and that's really some comments on the benefit of changing to linear power... @_@ is it that good?

Computer Audio Asylum - True - but at the time when I bought it, I compared it against Benchmark - - carcass93 - January 15, 2009 at 12:45:57

Some people claim that a modded XFi beats the benchmark DAC. Go figure .

Ha.. got it..

But one thing is for sure: all those cards have space to improve by mods...

I don't mod, and I don't have time to mod, so the origianl quality is waht matter to me only. I think it also applys to most of the generic users..

Could somebody with the Essence stx please run dxdiag and tell me if it works or not? Please list your motherboard and OS in your post as well. It blue screens and restarts when I try just like when I try to play FEAR. This is in windows xp 32 bit. The event viewer says event 1001 save dump and lots of other numbers I won't post because it won't let me copy\paste in their stupid window Thanks!

Finally got unlazy and went to pick-up my card ( i love my town lots of ghetto PC part dealers lol) today. Costed me an extra 144$ because of a stupid parking ticket, thank you Mr. Agent from Montreal !!!!!!

Connected my HD-595 they sounded good , i can hear lots of new details on the beats. My FLAC and ALAC songs sound great. I did put the headphones on High Gain by accident lol ( low volume ) they did sound super nice haha.. but i guess i shouldn't do that right ??? nominal gain on HD-595 is 50db and High Gain is 64 db-300db on card.

Then i connected my Pro media Klipsch, amazing sound came out of them very precise sound , clear

Also with the spdif out i connected it to my Yamaha HTR-8190 with a pair of RTi10's, CSi3 and Velodyne DPS12. Big difference from the default mobo HD realtek sound. With the Dolby Virtual Speaker on they sounded better, but it still needs to be tweaked. Ive only listened to music no movie yet.

Last my Dynex 2$ mic works no prob , since i disabled my back mic input, i hooked up the front panel inputs to the card directly and that did the trick.

All in all the card is a big improvement on SQ , very happy with the result, i guess it will improve with "burn in" effect. Wouldn't mind installing a opamp to it later on.

***grr double post***

Kind of glad you posted as I haven't found anyone besides me who has had this problem, so it would be interesting to see what components we have in common. It bluescreens on dxdiag and also on World of Warcraft loading screen. I wouldn't doubt it would also do this on FEAR. I have posted on the official ASUS forums and they say they are aware of it and are working on a fix...but who knows how long that will take. A work around for me right now is to click "GX" before running either dxdiag or WoW. This will skip the blue screen. After successfully getting into either program, I can safely off GX mode and no blue screen happens. The problem is that I can't hear sound in WoW no matter what I do...but it's not a big deal to me as the sound is kind of unnecessary in that game anyway. But for FEAR....yeah, kinda need the sound. I'm pretty sure the workaround will leave you in the same boat as me on WoW; it will get you past the blue screen, but you won't get any game sound.

Don't bother trying to fix it yourself...trust me I spent an entire day of trying different things. Reinstalled windows several times, tried different BIOS's, different orders of driver installations, switching ram slots, etc. I have a feeling it's because of my motherboard, which is listed down below. If you have the same one tell me and I'll post it in the thread I started on the ASUS forums.

CPU: Intel Q6600
Ram: G. Skill DDR2 800
Mobo: EVGA Nvidia 680i LT
GFX: XFX 8800GTX
OS: Windows XP Professional 32bit Service Pack 3

Thanks for the reply. My motherboard is an Asus P5B-deluxe. I got the game to run by going into the game config and checking disable all sounds. I got beat pretty bad though. Sound is really useful in fps's apparently Oh well hopefully they fix it soon. I really want this card to work out since I can hear a whole extra layer of stuff that wasn't apparent with the D2X. It's not night and day but it's significant enough for me to be glad I bought it.

HOTHOTHOT.. this is just in..
I went to Asus forum to see if anyone's reporting the same issue, and found they've just posted a feedback answering to this issue, check it out:

ASUSTeK Computer Inc.-Forum- FEAR & WOW crash FIX

I had another question about the card...since it says in the specs it outputs 24bit...should I enable the bit depth in foobar to be 24 instead of the default 16? Not sure if that's what bit depth is or not.