Sound Card Reviews

Excellent card, just not sure why they are advertising as pcie 2.0 when it does 3.0. Also the speecs everywhere else is 3.0. Excellent card though u wont go wrong if u have the money.

All in all this bad boy can handle whatever you throw at it, haven't ran into any lag in any game with ultra settings.Fan noise is beautiful, no noise coming from this gpu really, stays at 30c idle and max I have seen at load was 50c.6 display ports for Eyefinity.Setup is easy, the only thing I fret about since switching to AMD from Nvidia is cpanel options for each display, AMD to me doesn't have that many selective options that can make regular display life easier, but all in all its a great GPU.

Most likely the best graphics card money can buy. Theyre quiet, fast, and I can run wow on ultra and get 150 fps and up

I have never been a "fanboy" of any company, just a lover of computer hardware and tech. I have probably 12 video cards spanning the last 2 years in my computers here. I purchased this Diamond 7970 3GB card last week from Amazon and have never been happier. Overclockers will be overjoyed...I have this thing overclocked from 925MHz core to 1200 with NO voltage increase, stable! It runs cool, quiet (although I stuck a nice EK waterblock on it). They did everything right with this card. Do yourself a favor and pick one up!I am waiting for these to get back in stock so I can buy two more, no joke. This is coming from a guy with 3 x 3GB 580s in his other rig:)If you have any questions, please let me know!Johnny

I'm very familiar with the Xonar's lineage as I have both the Xonar ST and Xonar DG installed on two of my home computers. Naturally, I got very excited ever since I read about the E1 a few months back and been patiently waiting for it to show up on Amazon. I bought it as soon as it showed up on Amazon.High end audio gear is a highly personal thing and is all about synergy with your other components so buying from Amazon gives me the peace of mind just in case it doesn't work out for me. I have my fair share of disappointments with various hyped up audio stuff and snake oil hence I don't know if I'm going to like it after the initial euphoria runs out.I'm going to be writing the review in several phases and over a period of time as I put the E1 through its paces. The concept of burn-in for solid state electronics is a very debatable topic hence I don't want to go there but personally I have noticed some improvement if not night and day after the initial burn-in period on my other audio gear. I will let it burn-in for a week or so. I will give my final judgment/rating once everything settles down.Finally Santa came last evening with the E1 and left it outside my door step.ACTUAL REVIEW:PACKAGING:Refreshing to see a well designed sturdy box with some good catchy graphics unlike the plain brown boxes of some other high end audio gear. Everything was in its own compartment. The box with the E1 inside weighed about 10-11 pounds. All in all, I would say the packaging was adequate and…

I work in the streaming media industry and have used many different types of sound cards...The Audigy 2 does its job, but I think there are a few annoyances.1. It is an external sound card with an USB interface, but it still needs a seperate power supply (although it needs just 5Volts)2. Your computer has to be ON all the time even when you are just trying to route the audio from another external device like your VCR. This makes no sense to me given the fact that this sound card has its own dedicated power supply. So, even though it is an "external" card, it is still pretty much wedded to your computer. I could as well have used a cheaper internal card that does the same thing.3. The Media control software crashes very easily. Especially when you try to launch the media control when your Audigy card has been powered off4. When you use the "Mute" button on your remote, many times you find no way of Un-Muting - pressing the Mute on your remote does not have an effect and you have to walk over to your computer and manually un-mute it. This happens to me 9 out or 10 times.5. There is huge difference in the volume levels of your audio output depending on whether you play audio using the Creative's media player Or some other player like the Windows media player. They have a "smart" volume control but enabling it made the audio sound kind of "choked up".I would suggest that you buy this card if you plan on using it solely with your laptop. But…

Purchased this item on release day on Amazon when it was on backorder. Surprisingly enough, my order went through and shipped on the same day! Got it the next day, since I paid for overnight shipping. Had to pay sales tax though, since I had it shipped to New York. Sigh.Anyway, more about the card.This thing is huge! Significantly larger than my old GTX 560 Ti (which died on me and had RMA'ed). Performance-wise, the card pushes most games out today at Ultra. It easily gets 80-100 fps in Battlefield 3. Most of the time I have it set with V-Sync turned on, though, so it uses less power and runs cooler. The GPU overclocks like a beast, too. Got it running at around 1227 MHz stable on my first try. I reckon I can push it much further than that, but it seems unnecessary at this time.Temperature-wise, the stock cooler on this card surprisingly performs really well. It runs much cooler than my GTX 560 Ti, which used to run at 85C. The stock cooler is really silent on idle up until the 75% mark. By the time you reach the 85% (max) fan speed, the card's fan gets fairly loud.One thing to note, though: When overclocking, this card will start to slightly downclock the GPU core once the temperature hits 70C, which is fairly peculiar since 70 degrees is practically cool enough for a GPU. This is one more reason why I won't tinker with the Power Target just yet until my GTX 680 Backplate & High-flow bracket arrives (as increasing voltages would increase temps).But on stock GPU clocks, I've…

Everything about this card makes me very happy. I normally run about 25 degrees celcius on the internet, when gaming I'm maxed out on crysis 2 on all setting, the game plays extremely smooth with no noticeable hesitation and my temps are right around 45 to 47 degrees during the action packed scenes. I am using an Intel 875k on an EVGA P55 motherboard with only 4 gigs of ram. The quality and appearance of this video card are absolutely top notch, I would recommend this card to my friends and I would definately buy the same card again. With this GTX 580 single GPU card, there is no need to take the leap for me to a dual GPU card which costs two to three hundred more. This card was purchased for $500 on Amazon and I am extremely happy with the decision, my system just took huge leaps and bounds with this new additon. Also note, I am running a Fatality Champion Series case which is awesome, but keep in mind it's a little light on cooling fan positions, it only allows 2 small fans in the front and only one in the back, there are no allowances for a top or side fan so the temps I'm getting are not bad at all considering I'm running a GTX 580 and a case with outdated cooling system.

The car is what you could expect from the Quadro range, an excellent piece of hardware with very good performances with professional applications. If you are only after casual 3D modeling or for gaming, it is better (less expensive) to look for a GTX 580, however for professional use this is an outstanding product.I also give 5 star because of the Amazon service : it happened to me that a wrong board was sent the first time : I was obviously disappointed and sent a claim to Amazon. To my amazement, in less than 24 hours they acknowledged it and sent over a new board (on December 24th) without asking a single question. I can honestly say I never experienced an aftersales service like this.

Azuzentech is not an honorable or reliable company. I bought a Bravura card from them still within warranty but just because I lost the warranty card (even though I can prove I bought it and where) they only pretended by email like they might help me, but instead they've been ignoring me. This card too clearly has the same issue, just read what the other reviewer said. Do not trust these idiots till they stop being thieves and liars. Let them go bankrupt.

So I've been through a lot of cards in a short period of time trying to find one that I liked. I had 570's in SLI (Not enough VRAM), Sapphire 7970 (Too hot and loud as a train), Sapphire Dual Fan 7950 (Great card but would black screen crash after 2 minutes of gaming) and finally the Asus 7950 Direct CU II. The Asus card runs extremely cool on air and the fans never come close to being as loud as my case fans. My temps are around 44c on a Corsair 550d case with a few added fans and when the card was in a Corsair 500r with added fans the temps never went above 38c at full load for hours.I would highly recommend adding/replacing fans to your case if you are using the stock fans. When I swapped out my case for the 550d the card was running around 68c @ load with stock fans which was a huge jump in temps. I added a 140mm bottom intake and 2 140mm top exhaust fans and the temps shot down to 44c @ load. Just keep that in mind if you are buying this card for low temps and noise because bad airflow will cause the card to run hotter and louder then what it should.Performance wise there is still something to be desired. I'm not really seeing a huge jump in performance compared to a single 570 so I doubt the card is coming close to its true potential. On Battlefield 3, the card struggles maintaining 60FPS even on high settings. I'm not sure if it's drivers, the game, or the card that's causing such bad performance.Overall, the card is still great even with the performance issues and I would…

XFX changed the warranty on this card from "Lifetime" to 2yrs. Save your money and buy another branded 7970. XFX also only includes one cable while the others include the display port cable etc which is a $30 cable. XFX is simply a compny attempting to cut corners and unless you want to go down that road, look elsewhere for a 7970.

I really want to purchase one of these maybe 2 if i can fit in my brand new case, but at amazons price of $700+ i might need to shop around to find a lower price!

I got the R5970 lightning II first, it was great and i loved it! but then a year later this BFG came out, and what a BFG! this thing is like... im actually not sure but def. over a foot long. Honestly i tried to fit it in my antec 900 mid ATX but ... nope i ended up having to move around my hard drive to get it in... did i mid this? Nah, iv mod'ed this PC out so much it dosen't even phase me.Soo whats bad about this product... performance wise. nothing other then i can not see any difference between it and the R5970.. the stats are higher but the human eye can see the difference.But luck has it, this thing runs at half the noise of my R5970 and, get this the guys who bought the old card off me did it because it was such a quiet card... goes to show how quiet this card really is. I dont usually OC cuz my PC is already hella fast and it wouldent make a difference in performance but one of my friends bench marked his at 1100mhz/s and its already the fastest card on the market at 940 mhz so i had to try... low and behold i got it to 1100 mhz/s. Honestly looking back this was a stupid decision cuz you never never never should OC that Far, but just in case your wondering... 59FPS @ 72 deg C. W/ only 65% fan speed. moral of the story this thing runs coooool. and for that matter kinda looks cool -- if thats even a sales pont

I bought this card because I wanted professional grade performance and reliability. I got the first, but so far not the latter.The card worked brilliantly for the first couple of months. I use a variety of graphic-intense utilities like Maya, Blender, and GIMP on a regular basis. This card chewed through very dense 3D geometry models with ease. For sure, this card runs at a higher average temperature than most, but that's what the low-profile, high-performance design will get you, so no complaints there.After a couple of months the card would shutdown (screen goes black & system locks up) after just a few minutes of use. I discovered that the fan just wasn't running at all - so the card idled itself up to >100 deg C and shutdown. PNY quickly accepted my RMA request and sent me a new card. (Kudos to their fast response). However, the replacement card had the same issue! (Anti-kudos for a faulty replacement). The fan on this card will sporadically work, but most often exhibits the same fan issue as the first, leaving me unable to do my work. I am now on my 2nd RMA with this card.To PNY's credit, their support has been relatively easy to deal with - quickly granting RMAs and providing other helpful diagnostics along the way. However, I am overall displeased with the reliability of their product. Like I said, I bought this card expecting professional performance and reliability. Still waiting for the second half.