Ars Technica Reviews The Asus Xonar DGX and DSX Budget Sound Cards

[sholling]

This was pretty interesting even though I already run the mid-tier Xonar DX in my home-office desktop PC. In this review they measure and compare the $40 Asus Xonar DGX and $50 DSX and compare them to the $90 DX and to Realtek's latest and greatest ALC898 onboard audio. I'm not sure how scientific their listening tests were but they back them up with measurements.

Review

For years, we've trumpeted the benefits of discrete sound cards. They simply sound better than the typical integrated audio on motherboards, especially for those with discerning ears and halfway-decent speakers or headphones. Good sound cards tend to last through multiple upgrade cycles, too. They're amazingly inexpensive considering the expected lifespan. Indeed, the two we'll be putting under the microscope today—Asus' Xonar DGX and DSX—sell for less than $50.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Few notes:
a) Not to surprising all three Asus cards produced good results
b) ARS didn't benchmark Realtek 898 CODEC, but it's specific implementation in Hi-End Mobo from (probably) The Best Producer of Hi-End mobos - Asus .
Yes, it's cheesy, but I hope I got my point across - Same codec may perform very poorly depends on overall mobo design -

Case in point my home pc mobo - ASRock P67 EXTREME4 B3 (Asrock is asus's budget brand) which has Realtek ALC892 codec - was implemented very poorly, or at-least it's analog portion - it's extremely noisy and absolutely unusable -
That said my work pc - HP Pavilion Elite HPE Machine with older Realtek 888 Codec is very usable and isolated much better....

 

[sholling]

I agree with your point. I use the onboard ALC892 in my HTPC but over HDMI so I'm bypassing all of the noise making stuff.

How much of an improvement the Xonar DX is over over my desktop's ALC887 is over toslink is hard to say but the 887 was a pretty limited audio chip even if it was state of the art for Realtek at the time.