Home > Consumer Reviews > Asus Xonar D2 Sound Card (Black)

I got this card to replace an X-Fi Fatal1ty card. The Xonar is superior to it in many ways. First of all, it includes many of the Dolby technologies designed for home theaters. PC users will also benefit from this, the card has Dolby Headphone and a Virtual Speaker which delivers incredible sound quality in any environment. Second, the drivers for this card are solid. Unlike the X-Fi, this card is designed for 32 AND 64-bit computers. To Creative X-Fi owners, this means you can turn on Cool n' Quiet without popping. You can also turn on the memory hole (if you have 4GB or more of RAM) and not have to deal with the snapping, crackling, hissing, and popping noises. Third, if you are a digital music creator, the Xonar comes with a whole suite of music creation software which makes the steep price tag worth it even more. Finally, the audio controls included in the driver package allow users to tweak the sound to perfection. The only thing this card doesn't do as well as an X-Fi is gaming. The Xonar only supports up to EAX 2 not EAX 5. This is a small issue as most games don't support it anyway. The X-Fi also delivers greater performance in gaming. However, the difference is negligible.

I upgraded from a Audigy 2 and am using a headphone jack to RCA splitter running to an integrated amplifier and high quality tower speakers. This card is great! Awesome sound quality and hearing the subtle sounds missing before in music and in games. Really a big difference from before. I can't personally compare it to the high end Creative Pro card, but from all the research I've done it blows all the Creative products away, is cheaper, and there's even a beta driver for EAX 5.0 so in case that's an issue...

Overall, this is a great sound card that just works. I've been burned in the past by Creative cards which tend to have cracks or hissing in the audio that were never corrected. That is not the case here, in part due to the shielding on the card that eliminates interference and also to good drivers.

The sound quality is great and is a huge step up from the integrated audio in motherboards. The LED's on the audio input jacks on the back of the card are a nice touch and make hooking items up in the dark an easy task. The card also includes a lot of utilities, one of which makes ripping audio files from sound coming through your speakers very easy.

Although it's a bit expensive, the sound quality and extra features over integrated audio solutions really makes it worth the premium price.

Flawless installation unlike Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum with all of it's software and driver problems. Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum eX Soundcard Xonar D2 PCI installed without any problem. The only con I have is that I would like to see the Xonar D2 Audio Center software replicate more closely an actual Reciever interface. I preferred older Turtle Beach software. For this price range, I am very satisfied.

Have been suffering for years with the Creative "memory hole" problem. The Dell XPS 600 came with a Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic card. It worked great with 2 GB memory that came on the PC (OS XP MCE 2005). When I upgraded to 8 GB of menory got the dreaded Creative Snap, Crackle, Pop and would lose audio. It worked this way on Vista and eventually Windows 7 (current OS). Had to limit memory use to 2 GB! Creative blamed Nvidea (chipset manufacturer) and Nvidea blamed Creative.

After much research decided to try the Asus Xonar D2. Well the difference was night and day, sound was great, not more Snap, Crackle, Pop even with 8 GB of memory installed. Was a little reluctant to try because of the price but for me it has been well worth it, kudos to Asus, goodby Creative. Looks like Nvidea was right.

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