New Sound Card

Tenko71

Tenko71

Tenko71

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Joined
25 Jan 2018
Posts
7
I'm looking to upgrade the sound on my PC by adding a new sound card and was wondering if anyone had any recommendations.

The sound card will only be used for gaming, mostly FPS games, at the moment it's PUBG so footsteps and directional sound are important.

I'm currently using HD599 headphones but will consider changing these in the future if there are better ones available.

Budget for the sound card is £200 (not including the headphones).

I've been looking at the Soundblaster range but I'm unsure if the more expensive models are worth the extra money or is it just additional features that I'll never use. I'm not limiting my options to just Soundblaster though.

I've borrowed the Sennheiser GSX1000 from a friend and although the positional sound is very good, I've had a hard time hearing footsteps so the lack of settings that can be changed has put me off buying this.

Any recommendations are appreciated.
 
Thanks for the reply

I've been using the onboard for some time and it just isn't loud enough for some reason, I borrowed the GSX1000 to see if this made a difference, and it did, not a huge amount louder, but better, albeit I have to have it around 90 volume.

The GSX1000 is great for directional sound when set to 7.1 (I know PUBG does not support this), but with this setting it seems to lose the sound of footsteps until the player is right on top of you, setting it to 2.0 improves the footsteps a little but reduces the directional sound, especially with gun shots. So even though you seem to be able to get one for £130 ish at the moment I'm not sure that is the way to go for me.

I've read that the Soundblaster sound card equalizier settings can be tweaked to get a good mix of the two, but I'm not sure if these are decent cards in general, which model is better and also if there is a better option from another manufacturer.
 
Hi EsaT, thank you for the reply, having read a number of posts on this forum and done some additional research myself I decided to go with the Sound BlasterX AE-5.

This might be a silly question but what is the optimal setup for the card, i.e. how should I set Windows and what settings should I choose in connect to get the best out of my headphones?

The equalizer settings and pre-set options (FPS shooter, Gaming etc.) I can have a play with as I'm sure that will be down to personal preference, I'm just talking about the initial setup of the device.
 
Great, thanks again.

Just wanted to check as I'm never sure if it's best to select stereo or 5.1/7.1 in Windows settings when using headphones like the HD599's
 
I've only had a limited time for gaming over the last week so haven't been able to properly put the AE-5 through it's paces yet.

Playing PUPG with the sound card set to Direct HP (Stereo) I'm definitely experiencing a much clearer and detailed sound experience than I was with either on-board sound or the GSX1000.

Footsteps are a lot more obvious and I can easily tell the direction of vehicles, distant gun shots and things like the red zone.

When I get some more time I do want to have a play with the 5.1 surround settings to see how that performs with PUBG. If anyone does play PUBG with their headphones set to 5.1 then I would be interested to know what settings they are using.

The only negative I have for the card at the moment is that I do have some issues where the Connect software does not recognise the card is installed following a system restart, it's fine after a shutdown, but after a restart I have to un-install and re-install the hardware and software. Yesterday I also had a new problem where the card was working but in Connect it didn't give me the option to change the headphone output from Direct HP to 5.1, that whole row of icons was missing!

Other than the technical issues above I have to say I'm very happy with it so far though.
 
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