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Senior Member
Sound card upgrade question..
I currently have a Xi-Fi Extreme Gamer sound card that I got about 4 years ago.. When I recently upgraded my rig I kept the old card but I am thinking of getting this card. I can get it for under $100. What do you think? I really don't have any problems with my current card .. I guess a part of this is just gas.. and I want to finish the upgrade.. What do you guys think?
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Senior Member
That's a great audio card. You will definitely like it for audio listening. 24 bit 96/192 kHz is sweet (if you have the source material and matching hardware).
As for gaming... Direct3D positional hardware support went out the door with Windows 7. Sound is completely rendered by the CPU (software) since then There are some (cumbersome) ways to get hardware acceleration working through OpenAL however. AFAIK IL-2 uses software rendering of 16 bit 44.1 kHz sound samples since FB v1.0 so this card will probably do nothing to improve on that.
For audio you would need SACD releases. These play through SACD players or BluRay (check Amazon, MFSL releases etc.). Still a bit rare, but online audio streaming will take off in the near future. You could use a USB bluray player too on a Media streamer/PC.
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Senior Member
Also have a look at the Asus Xonar DX/XD - Similar specifications at half the price.
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Senior Member
Thanks Max.. Yeah I was looking at a Xonar.. I know a few musician buddies of mine who use them.. I decided to jst keep my $$ .. my current card is working just fine.