Hardware wise, D2X is quite nice, better than all creatives, except the latest Creative HD series. Unfortunately, Asus drivers kinda suck beyond measure, and forget about their laughable EAX support. You do know that Asus claimed to have support for EAX5, and got their ass sued because of that. Virtually all sorts of chips can do EAX1 and 2 because creative made those levels open source. EAX3 is supported recently by very few manufacturers, and EAX4 and 5 is still exclusive to them. For music and movies? Sure. For games, creatives (yes, even audigy cards) blow everyone else out of the water.
Creative's windows drivers have a few issues, that can usually be fixed through configs, or just using modded drivers, there are currently two famous modders, one working for creative, the other not but still allowed to mod. Linux is tricky, as none of the x-fi features are available, but there are at least 2 drivers made for linux that do work, through ALSA if I'm not mistaken. I advised less expensive upgrades, if I was to advise something with the price of a D2X, I'd go with at least something from Auzentech, and from there forward there's the true audio gear, that kinda begin costing quite more, and aren't made for gaming. And since Angelic's computer with linux is a laptop, an internal soundcard is out of the question. But don't get me wrong Nin-lil-izi, I find the D2X a rather interesting soundcard, but not for digital HD audio, gaming or audio customization. On 8 Jan, 02:04, Nin-lil-izi <[email protected]> wrote: > I highly advise against putting Linux and X-Fi cards anywhere near > each other. > Creative Labs have proven over the years to be resistant to open > source software and driver support for such. As a result the quality > of said *nix drivers has been a cursory token gesture at best. > It took 3 years after release to get even the current basic driver up > to a point where it could be merged into the kernel. And before then > making the card work at all required either many hours of compiling > and kludging or an earlier bugy binary blob that required the use of a > specific distro and kernel revision to function. > Creative Labs windows drivers have never been terrific either. And > worse the company has a policy of enforced obsolescence through > strategic dropping of driver support. They have essentially been re- > branding the same architecture as new products. Then dropping driver > support for the old line, forcing upgrades for their last three > product generations. > If you need evidence of their poor business practices, then feel free > to google away for complaints people have had. > > Myself, I use an Asus Xonar > D2X.http://uk.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=ZBWhAEnH6nDOB00E&content=overview > It has superior audio quality over the X-Fi. Has always worked out of > the box with Linux, using an open standards driver interface. I've not > had a single issue with it after a couple of years of ownership. > Usefully, is easily configurable between its various analogue (5.1, > 7.1, 2.0, etc) and Digital coax /fibreoptic output modes with a single > click from the Ubuntu indicator area GUI as well. -- 9xx SOLDIERS SANS FRONTIERS
