ASUS Xonar D2 was launched a while back and at a recommended retail price of $190 it is a direct competitor to the more expensive cards of the Creative X-Fi series. ASUS has been boasting its selection of components, high-quality build and digital output capabilities in an attempt to break Creative’s dominance. A couple of reviews have appeared by now and they all pretty much come to the same conclusion. ASUS has managed to build a very good and high-quality sound card, but it has two minor shortages when compared to the X-Fi series.
Creative, with its gaming focus, has equipped with X-Fi cards with quite powerful and hardware-accelerated DSPs, which the ASUS Xonar D2 lacks. This creates a bigger load on the PCI bus, and causes a higher CPU utilization. The second is the EAX support, not much to say about that.
Overall though the Xonar D2 has received high marks and several awards. The Xonar D2 seems to be an excellent product and definitely worth considering if you’re in the market for a new sound card.
