First post, by ptr1ck
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I'm trying to sort out which will best meet my needs between these three for a lower powered XP system, Athlon XP 2.3ghz. The case has front panel HD audio connection, no AC97, which I do want to work well for headphones. I do have an adapter (from moddiy.com) for the Audigy that connects it to HD Audio. It's the same connector for the Santa Cruz, which I haven't tried with it yet. The Xonar has native HD Audio connection.
CL Audigy 2 - This card is an OEM version but is SB0350. I run Daniel K drivers with it, support pack 8.0. I've never been a fan of Creative for numerous reasons, which started when they killed Aureal. I keep the driver install relatively slim, but still looks like it's running more processes than it really needs. Headphone front panel doesn't completely mute the rear output when plugged in. I'm not sure if it's a driver issue or the adapter to front panel. It has a completely useless firewire port on it, which I don't like.
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz - This was the card I bought back in the day after my Vortex 2 had too many compatibility issues with Win2k. I was very anti-Creative at the time and this is what I used for a long time until I did actually get a retail Audigy 2ZS (which is now not working). I really like this card for it's simplistic approach and what looks to be slim drivers. It has always sounded great to me. It's the least attractive card in the bunch (windowed case) as it has a ton of ill mounted electrolytic caps on it and the CD audio connector is slightly bent. It is in the last PCI slot with the front most concealed though. I need to test the functionality of the front panel headphone with this card.
Asus Xonar DG - I picked this up for a Win10 box a couple years ago because it was cost effective huge upgrade to low end onboard Realtek. I use the Uni Xonar driver package for it. I have always though the sound was very clean. The card is very integrated with a C-Media Oxygen HD CMI8786 audio processor. It is low profile and the cleanest install look as well. Front headphone output is manually selected in the driver, which works fine, but I would prefer an automatic change when headphone is detected.
I want decently working front panel headphones via HD audio and the simpler the driver the better. EAX is not critical. The lowest CPU overhead would be beneficial as the system is bottlenecked there. I wouldn't mind running some tests, but I have no idea where to start with sound card testing.
edit: Benchmarks are a few posts down.