@Arc'xer so any particular recommendations? Or you're slipping in the Xonars in the middle of your message?
A lot of people and a lot of reviews do recommend the xonar line the ST being the best of the 3 due to lower jitter and the sound it produces is different than the STX, even some returning their STX and exchanging it for the ST albeit the ST does have a PCI connector and unfortunately PCI seems to be going out for some I think they would need a PCIe to PCI adapter.
I went with the x-fi forte, seems like they don't make the forte anymore or they made such a small run it's always out of stock.
Honestly if I had to go back and buy a sound card I would buy the Xonar. It's not that the forte is a bad sound card but it just doesn't wow me anymore and to be honest at times it was a pain to install or reinstall. Hell I even uninstalled it and used onboard because I kept getting noise from the GPU. mouse scrolling and window minimizing and maximizing(and still do guess the lack of shielding was shortsighted) seems like a common problem for it picking up noise. Although my forte doesn't seem to be as bad as others who've had worse problems(seems like a well-built version) it does pick up noise, when near the GPU but away it's dead silent, though as strange as this sounds I kinda feel a sort of electrical background field but that could just the isolation factor of my own self.
It's nice and all but it's kinda disappointing. I should have spent the extra money on the ST. Maybe dolby is better for gaming than considered by some(some have said dolby is not on par with CMSS). Using CMSS-3D sure it's nice and all but never really like "WHOA"(at first yes but then I noticed the issues). And weird things would happen when I'd be gaming like losing track of sounds even in front of me(they would disappear as if the sound didn't exist). Or focusing too much on were the sound will be. I guess it could be a limit of the AD700s, lack of clarity at times and I often looking back spent a bit of mental processing trying to locate people or tell which direction things were. I always noticed directional clues were blurred and or misconstrued.
I've been so disappointed I even at one point considered buying the astro mixamp just to see if I could get better sound and whatnot from dolby though I never did buy it.
I rarely if ever felt secure of locating my enemies the instant I needed so(I'm exaggerating just a little bit but sometimes it made me wonder like what's going on here). Maybe it's the AD700s, I have read a few accounts of the AD700s lacking a bit in detail and clarity of the stereoscopic field(very wide but lacking in detail). But I guess at the same time it could have been the card and the creative 3D system or whatever. I tried a lot of combination pure stereo upmix, 5.1/7.1 downmix etc.etc. through windows properties like it mattered anyways since the card ignores it or so it's said.
There's also the titanium HD which was released a few months back. I didn't bother reading much of it. Some are happy with it but I want to get away from the whole creative thing.
But don't just go out and buy the card. From what I read the dac/amp systems in the xonar are the best bang for buck compared to an entry level external equipment. At least what they mean is that for something that costs that much it sure does offer a surprising closeness.
Here's two posts I posted with issues involving my audio setup:
http://geekhack.org/showpost.php?p=232454&postcount=40and....
http://geekhack.org/showpost.php?p=232626&postcount=44Like I said take your time to decide. To be honest I stopped suggesting things to people because I always worry that person will come back and be like "Dude WTF I wasted my money, thanks asshat". And really my recommendations stink anyways, in terms of typing them out. Sounds all random and whatnot; very unprofessional. There's a lot of versus posts and stickies around the internet on onboard vs add-on card out there.
