Asus Xonar D2 inbound!
 

After almost 2 years of x-fi hell I finally decided to order up a Xonar, I've seen a lot of crying about it's emulated EAX but ffs any EAX is emulated in vista due to MS being idiots and removing hardware accalerated sound from the damn os!

I'll follow this up later with impressions and differences noted between the 2 cards.

Sweet! I can't wait to see what you think. Their cards are expensive, but are supposed to be da bomb.

So far I think Newegg's shipping sucks...

This thing hasn't come in yet? Seems like it was ordered last month. :rofl

Early impressions of the new card are very good, installation was a snap! I uninstalled the old card's software and rebooted and ran Ccleaner several times until it came up clean, shut the machine off and swapped cards. On boot the new card was immediately recognized and vista prompted that it wished to install software for it, I declined vista's help and installed the driver. After reboot the card worked in every way it was intended to and with a little tweaking of the EQ it sounds better than my previous x-fi by a significant margin.

The real test for me will be gaming, I'll update this post after I try it out for a while.

Nice card but damn that's expensive!

My previous x-fi cost more...

Toldya so..........:p

Game sound seems to be quite good but counterintuitive to setup after years of using x-fi cards, I am actually using no digital filters with environment set to "Room". I wouldn't have thought the environmental settings would be used at all but the room effect is actually an improvement for in game sounds, directional sound seems to be very good too despite what some have said. Some games sound completely new to me since all I have heard in certain parts were sound bugs (feedback or popping sound), so far I am giving this card a 10/10 for music and games.

Sounds like a killer card. We know how picky you are about gaming quality.