ASUS Card from HW leaderboard dream sys

[ChewieFL2003]

I thought I ordered the wrong one from amazon. But no.
Follow the link from the HW Leaderboard page to newegg, look at specs.... (I didnt think it would be necessary to check first, I thought what the heck, its reccomended for the dream system....)

So now I am downloading from ASUS website, and hoping everything works out ok.

Id like to know if pcper is aware they are reccomending a $170 soundcard, that does not ship with Windows 7 drivers. Windows 7 is not even listed as supported.

**didnt mean it to sound so snide, leaving post as is for honesty sake. It is actually a question. Maybe the problem is what I was expecting (something "new" and win 7, not 2009 and a download)
*** for the record it seems to be working fine, far in excess of what I need for games, and that makes me happy. But it sure gave me a scare when I went to install it!

Chewie

So, yeah a cut and paste. 1400 views no response in HW leaderboard forum.
As it turns out, I did start to have odd errors, with games, and crashes with games, and some boot issues cold and warm (although very infrequent), that all go away if I take out the card, and go back to onboard sound.

If you poke about the ASUS site you can get drivers for Win 7, I do not think they are to stable.

Someone prove me wrong, say "Hey I am using this card with Win 7 64 and it works great!".

Maybe educate me, since it still weirds me out a little, that a card ships today, that does not have Win 7 support, at least not in its documentation, and does not ship with Win 7 drivers. Then I noticed the manufacture date of the card.

I thought I would go with ASUS since there are good reports of their cards as an alternative to Creative products, which IRONICALLY, I wanted to avoid because of lacking Win 7 support......

I am set on sending this card back even if I eat the cost. On that note, can I get a few reccomendations on a soundcard for games and high quality 'phones. It needs to be an excellent upgrade from onboard MSI Z68A GD65 G3. But I am not an audiophile.

I splurged on a set of Senny 360's. They sound good unamped, sound better with a bit of extra juice. If you think I am whacked and the ASUS card is great, PM me I'll do a for sale thread in appropriate forum or maybe a trade.

[xiz0r]

I have an older xonar d2/pm (pci) and before that a xonar DX (pci-e) and from what I can tell asus is EXTREMELY lazy with driver updates.
Took ~2 years before I got stable drivers with the d2/pm under win7 but it does work fine now apart from the mic input that sometimes stops working and require a reboot to fix. The DX was somewhat better for driver support and never had trouble with it (that I can recall) but it died shortly after the warranty was over and thats when I got a good deal on the d2/pm
I think asus updates driver more frequently on the more popular model (cheaper model sells more so better driver support for them ?) and those with the higher end xonar gets somewhat left out even though they paid a lot more $.
I say that because I recall more driver update in the times I had the DX then the d2/pm

my 2¢

[ChewieFL2003]

Thank you for the feedback. I ended up sending it back to amazon. No muss no fuss surprisingly.

-Chewie