Does a Xonar DX still hold its own and should I use it in my next build?

Adam123

Adam123

Adam123

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Hi,

I'm in the process of moving from an old Z97 build to an X570.

I currently have and use a Xonar DX with a pair on Sennheiser PC350 SE's which I believe are 150 Ohms.

These are currently serving me well and I don't plan on changing them any time soon.

Main system use is gaming, films, tv shows etc.

Has onboard sound come along far enough to not need a discrete sound card/ out perform a DX? The audio chipset on my current Z97 motherboard is a Realtek ALC892.

The motherboards I'm looking at are:

Strix F/E - SupremeFX Realtek S1220A
TUF - Realtek S1200A
X570 MSI Tomahawk / Gigabyte Aorus Elite - Realtek S1200

I welcome any advice or opinions.

Cheers
 
I have an x570 board with the same codec, and I'm still using a xonar d2x.
I used the onboard one for a while, can't say I really noticed a big difference. The noise floor is technically higher on the onboard, and looking at a couple of tests around, the noise on the onboard can be quite a bit higher when the system is loaded, but probably not enough to notice, unless you are sat there with no audio playing and headphones at a dangerously loud level.

I'm mostly using the d2x because it has extra connectivity I need, and I find the options in the drivers are a little better.

I will say that there is some potentially severe compatibility issues with the x570 chipset and the xonar range. I don't think it affects the dx as much, but I had to install the d2x in a specific PCI-e slot, capped at gen 1 speed, and install a different set of uni xonar drivers for the stxII to get it working, otherwise it would just hard restart the PC when installing the drivers. It's completely stable once installed though. It's apparently a hardware issue, not something that can be easily fixed with drivers, although it's not like Asus are going to be releasing new drivers given the age of the cards now. Have a look here to see what the issues are like: https://maxedtech.com/asus-xonar-cards-and-amd-ryzen-am4-motherboards-compatibility-report

If you can't get it working you wouldn't be losing that much, it's basically down to personal choice now.
 
Adam123 said:
I currently have and use a Xonar DX with a pair on Sennheiser PC350 SE's which I believe are 150 Ohms.

The motherboards I'm looking at are:
Strix F/E - SupremeFX Realtek S1220A
TUF - Realtek S1200A
X570 MSI Tomahawk / Gigabyte Aorus Elite - Realtek S1200
Click to expand...
Actually that 150 ohm headphone impedance is better with that card being those Xonars with lame 100 ohm output impedance.
Fashionable 32 ohm cans would have quite bad electric damping factor:
Just for scale technical guide is that output impedance of source should be at most 1/8 (usually rounded to 1/10) of headphone impedance...

Though for gaming that ancient Dolby Headphone isn't great with its tendency for bass bloat and echo.
Creative's newer HRTFs would be lot better.
(B-stock Sound BlasterX G6 Creative is selling darn good value)


Asus X570 boards have 15 year old bad chipset cooler design incapable to passive cooling.
Gigabyte and MSI boards can cool chipset semipassively and with good size heatsink even chipset fan failing is unlikely to cause too high chipset temperatures.
Had one Asus board with chipset fan 15 years ago and got enough of chipset cooler swapping in that.

Anyway you don't need very expensive board with already those £200 boards having overkill level VRMs.



lord filbuster said:
I will say that there is some potentially severe compatibility issues with the x570 chipset and the xonar range. I don't think it affects the dx as much, but I had to install the d2x in a specific PCI-e slot, capped at gen 1 speed, and install a different set of uni xonar drivers for the stxII to get it working, otherwise it would just hard restart the PC when installing the drivers. It's completely stable once installed though. It's apparently a hardware issue
Click to expand...
Issue likely comes from these PCIe Xonars using C-Media PCI sound chips over PCIe-PCI bridge chip.
That caused conflicts already originally when card was new.
 
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