ASUS XONAR SE 5.1 Channel 192kHz/24-bit Hi-Res 116dB SNR PCIe Gaming Sound Card with Windows 10 compatibility

I was a bit skeptical about modern sound cards, but I got this for an HTPC to check it out (it comes with a small form factor bracket that's easy enough to install). At first, I only tried the digital optical TOSLINK port, which did sound better, but only marginally. My advice is to stick to analog if possible, the effect is much more apparent, even to my relatively insensitive ears. Audio is much richer sounding than without it and will definitely improve a home audio system!Linux support is acceptable, I couldn't get the front panel header to work, but that might just be my HTPC distro or a configuration error on my end.

Fast shipping, this sound card has a nice price and sound to it, work's good on my AI server.

The sound was a great step up from the MB soundcard. I highly reccoment a DAC for best sound performance. Unfortunately, the sound will drop out for a split second every few songs. Im no expert, but it seems like a driver proble.

Works great for my amplifier that's hooked up to my speakers. Sounds FANTASTIC and super easy to setup.

A huge disappointment considering a noticeable improvement in audio quality over an ALC1150 chipset. While the card works fine the vast majority of the time I cannot in good faith recommend this device due to its occasional propensity to cause audio glitches and hang applications that are trying to output sound.There are no warnings or errors in the system event log, it just stops working until you reboot the system. I am running Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit with the latest 10.0.01.10 driver (also 64-bit). Sometimes the Xonar Audio Center disappears, other times it seems to think the device is working fine albeit it cannot switch outputs (at which point the software hangs).I expect nothing less than absolute rock solid performance out of such a fundamental device, thus this gets 1 star. I am also disappointed with the way Windows handles malfunctioning audio hardware (as in, it doesn't), but that is not the reason behind my low review score.I have been using this card for 21 days, every day, and have experienced this issue 6 times which necessitated an immediate reboot of the computer to resolve the issue. Disabling, deactivating, reinstalling driver did nothing. If I had to guess I'd say the card is getting caught in a bad hardware state from which it cannot recover until power cycled.

Easy to configure with their control panel!

The internal sound on my Asus motherboard died and rather than replace the entire board I just bought this card and the sound quality is excellent. Even when working the Asus had some hum and noise, this has no audible hum or noise even with the external amplifier at maximum gain.

I had a problem with my Asus Tuff 570 where the onboard sound wasn't working. After nearly two weeks of troubleshooting via suggestions from Asus' forums, hunting down all kinds of drivers and riding that merry-go-round of installing/wiping/testing I was about to yank the mobo out and send it back. After looking at all the hoops I'd have to jump through to do so, I figured I'd try buying a basic sound card to fix my issue.At $40, the issue was resolved for less than the price of shipping and hassle of no pc for 2-4 weeks.The card produces pretty good on my 2.1 system, and while I own good speakers, they're definitely not audiophile level performance. I can say that my speakers sounded better with the soundcard, than using the onboard realtek sound from my previous build. Bass was good, mid and high range were clearer without a tininess I used to deal with using the onboard.Installation was about as easy as it could possibly get. I literally just plugged it in, turned on the PC and Windows knew immediately what was going on, I didn't even have to install the drivers I downloaded. I did a wipe/reinstall anyway, as the downloaded version was newer however I didn't notice any difference in capabilities. Prior to purchase, I had read several of the 2/3 star reviews and was braced for potential problems with Windows, but I personally didn't run into any of the issues mentioned. It *might* be because my board is a Asus board, but I can't say with any confidence.Sadly, I did notice a drop in quality when I retrieved my 5.1 speakers from storage and wanted to see what they sound like. The 5.1 are pretty good quality, better than my 2.1, but I wanted less clutter on my desktop hence I went to 2.1. Anyway, the sound suffered a bit with the 5.1, while the bass was even better than before, the mid and high range were a less so. I was watching the Witcher series, and there is a lot of screeching in various scenes, it quickly proved too shrill and unpleasant through those speakers. When I ran some music through the 5.1, I noticed violins sounded very off and again, a bit shrill. Plugged the 2.1 back in and that wasn't the case.All in all, for what I needed a soundcard for, and at this price, it's a solid 3. If this goes out on me, I won't feel cheated and I didn't have any aggravations installing it unlike others have. Lets hope my luck holds.