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Which sound card to buy for gaming/music?

post #1 of 3
2/15/11 at 1:45pm
Thread Starter 

I'm in the process of building a new computer and I'm having some trouble deciding on the best sound card for my needs. I use my computer mostly for gaming, listening to music and surfing the web. Most of the time, I have to wear headphones and I primarily use the Sennheiser PC350 since it has a decent mic for multiplayer gaming. When I'm listening to music, I sometimes swap out the PC350 for HD 580s and when I do get a chance to unplug the headphones, I've got a pair of Swan M200MkIIIs connected.

Historically, I've bought Creative cards mostly because SoundBlaster and EAX had become the "standard" for games. Since the audio stack changes in Vista/Windows 7, I feel like a lot of Creative's advantage in games has been negated. I don't often go back and play any of my older games so I'm not concerned with EAX through Alchemy, etc. I also don't know that the offloading that X-Fi cards do is really that big of a deal on modern CPUs (I'm using an i7-2600K). So from a gaming perspective, is there any real advantage to one card over another any more?

I thought I had decided on the Asus Essence ST but now I realize that the only PCI slot on my motherboard is in between my video cards (2x GTX 580) which isn't going to help with heat much. So then I thought maybe the STX would be the way to go but then I started seeing a lot of people claim that that CMSS 3D is better than Dolby Surround for gaming in headphones and I started leaning towards the Titanium HD. But *then* I read that you can't switch between headphones and speakers on the Titanium HD without crawling under the desk and unplugging the headphones which I'm not at ALL interested in doing. Needless to say, I'm thoroughly confused now.

I'd say that gaming is probably the slightly higher priority for me with music (primarily FLAC and high bitrate MP3) being a close second. FWIW, I'm currently using a Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion which is going to be moved into a different system.  Does anyone have any thoughts that might help me decide which card to buy?

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post #2 of 3
2/17/11 at 8:44pm
Thread Starter 

Anyone?

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post #3 of 3
2/17/11 at 11:47pm

I would go with the titanium HD for gaming. As for switching between headphones and speakers, here is creative's response:

 

"The card is built this way to achieve better audio quality as compared to the Titanium model. The function to choose between headphones or speakers was not deliberately omitted but rather for the purpose of better audio quality. Unfortunately, no software update could be done to change this. "

 

So if that's a needed feature, look towards the Essence. You could hook up the front panel connection for easier access, but you might see some audio degradation.

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