looking for a Soundcard for this MB please?

Gigabyte Z97P-D3 Intel Z97 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard

hi

the sound card part of my MB as all of a sudden starting making loud cracking like noises so i was wondering if anyone can please recommend a sound card for under £30 which will work with this board.

oh and does it matter if the soundcard would be in next slot next to the graphics card?


massive thanks in advance

Are you using one GPU or 2?

A Xonar DGX might be OK below the top GPU slot, but it depends whether it will impede the GPUs fans.

If you're using just the one GPU, then lower down would be better. You could either get a DGX and fit that into the second PCIe 16x slot, or get a DG, which is PCI and put that in one of the bottom 2 PCI slots.

1 gpu. so better off using the the bottom pci slots then...

With that motherboard layout you are probably better off getting a PCI card as the two short PCIe cards are probably too close to the graphics card and using the second full length PCIe slot would force your graphics card into x8 mode instead of it's normal x16.

My Gigabyte motherboard has no PCI slots but does have three full length PCIe slots, so I use the bottom (x4) slot for my Xonar STX as it doesn't affect the speed of the two main slots.

thanks

is this Asus Xonar DG 5.1 PCI Sound Card ok for this board? that should og at the bottom and not cover my g card

Yeah. Will go in either of the bottom slots.

thanks for that, and didn't realise i had a 3 year warranty on the board so gonna also send a query to gigabyte just to see what they say. but i will grab that sound card in the mean time,

cheers