EVGA’s Brand NU Audio Pro 7.1 Premium Sound Card
OP AMPS, RGBs And Impressive Dynamic Range
Nikktech compared the EVGA NU against the relatively new Creative Sound BlasterX 720 and the elderly Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi and decided that there is a reason to pick up a new audio card. The specifications are impressive, certainly outperforming your built in audio and besides, your motherboards audio lacks extra RGBs! EVGA’s optional Audio Driver features Nahimic enhancements and a variety of audio control as well as a way to update your cards firmware.
After the very successful NU Audio Premium Sound Card EVGA is strengthening their presence in the PC audio market with the brand new NU Audio Pro 7.1 model, now featuring surround sound analog outputs.
Good to see sound cards still being developed. While with these higher end cards, I have not noticed much difference from mid range cards, e.g., With my setup of sub $200 headphones, the cards that are higher end than my current Sound blaster Z, fail to provide a noticeable improvement in quality. Sure they will benchmark higher if run through a spectrum analyzer, but in terms of what can actually be heard, there is no noticeable improvement.
This may change if I spend much more and go with something a few times more expensive than the Beyerdynamic DT990, but as it is now, the sound card is not the current bottleneck for my listening experience.
On the other hand, compared to the onboard soundcard in my Gigabyte Gaming 5 motherboard, a discrete sound card was a major improvement in audio quality. On newer systems that i have built for others, even with higher end $250+ boards, the onboard audio does not drive 250 Ohm headphones as well and don’t offer the same quality.