[Brando]

I've been to hell and back diagnosing instability in certain games and after lots of rma's and testing I've determined that asus's essence stx drivers crash my games.  They haven't had a new driver in awhile and I'm about to give up on a fix.  I think I just want a couple of jitter free optical outputs with reliable drivers that don't crash anything that I can output to my receiver and one day to a separate dac\amp for my ah-d7000's.  Oh and pcie 1x please.  Thanks all.

 

[OJNeg]

I use a Xonar DG and I've never had such problems (I do play games). I'm not sure if the DG uses the same drivers as the STX. You could look for a simple SPDIF PCI card. I have one that's really old and it works fine.

 

[Brando]

I think it may be a direct x 11 thing because I only got crashes in batman arkham city and max payne 3 both of which I believe had dx11 enabled.  I couldn't think of anything else to replace so I disabled the stx and went to the motherboards onboard and went 5 hours without a crash.  This card also had a problem crashing an old game called FEAR and asus quickly made a new driver to fix it.  I hope they do the same again soon but if not I guess I'll sell the stx and maybe get a toslink splitter.  Or maybe keep it how it is.  The headphone output on my hk3490 receiver is growing on me.  I assumed it would automatically suck but wow.....hmmm...

 

[Brando]

So nobody knows of a reasonably priced card with a nice clock, spdif and good drivers??  I think I may have to invent one.  It'll be as cheap as I can get it while having the best sanely priced clock available, coax AND toslink and NOTHING ELSE, and the most simple, compatible drivers possible that will allow every type of output with asio, kernel streaming, etc..  My company will be Brandaudio.  It'll be about 50 bucks.  If it already exists please let me know.