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« on: Thursday, August 02, 2012, 11:35:55 AM »
tidididi, I totally understand your point but you can't correlate audio to a CPU. Sure you can overclock a CPU but the more expensive one (same model & architecure) will be "binned" higher. This means it's a better quality chip and verified to work at faster speeds. Every chip, even in the same batch, is built slightly different due to manufacturing tolerances, some handle heat and speed better than others. Then when you get into different stepping of the same model, some steppings handle heat & speed better. There's so much variance in computer chips, not just CPU's.
Anyway, back to the subject, I won't discount that the X-Fi cards are likely better than onboard sound (although onboard on a new motherboard is pretty decent these days) but when you look at the whole picture, they really suck. There's so many things in an audio circuit that can degrade the quality. DAC chip, resistors, capacitors, amplifying circuit (opamps in low quality components, discrete in higher quality). Sennheiser is a good choice but I would recommend nothing lower than their 5xx series.
I am going for quality unaltered sound. I've been going through various audio equipment for a few years and I did start out with a X-Fi XtremeGamer card and it was a nice card but there's several components I prefer above them.
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