Buy internal PCI sound card or stick with ALC892 ?

[varunb]

I own a Z68 based motherboard which has Realtek ALC892 onboard sound chipset. I was thinking of buying a PCIe based sound card but unfortunately my graphic card has blocked both the PCIe 1x slots. There is no 4x slot & I cannot use 8x slot because that shares bandwidth with the CPU. So I am torn between buying a PCI slot based sound card or not. The only option I can think of is Asus Xonar DG card. I have been scouring the internet & some posts suggest to buy it & some say to use to the onboard only. Since I will be buying a 5.1 headset probably Roccat Kave 5.1 Analog or some other true 5.1 maybe soon, what do you guys suggest?

 

[EarthDog]

For that level of cans, I would imagine what you have is fine.

 

[varunb]

Never mind. I have made the purchase for the sound card & also bought Tritton Pro+ 5.1. Thinking about them had made my brain exhausted for the past few hours. Had to put an end to this.

 

[sobe]

That's fine, with headsets like those your integrated would have been absolutely more than satisfactory though. At least having the sound card though will be good if you plan to move to quality headphones in the future

 

[varunb]

Thank you for the replies. I have never used a sound card before so I was curious. I wish I could simply jump to a PCIe based card with better SNR value but I guess that will have to wait until this motherboard or CPU dies. I am slightly worried though about Win 10 drivers for Xonar DG.

 

[sobe]

You could try the latest Win8.1 drivers to see if they work, it really wouldn't surprise me if there were no issues running that set of drivers.