Running severely late I arrived at the ASUS stand where we met with 3 employees. Let's start off with some selected soundcards. Soundcards are important products for Guru3D.com. Recently a new staff member joined out team (Steven / ROBSCIX) who will try to push out as much news and reviews for you guys on soundcard and speaker related matters.

Above the Xonar Essence STX, a nice sound card with SNR up to 124dB we recently reviewed.

Here we have the new Xonar HDAV 1.3 SLIM, a low profile card. Affordable yet with any ear candy you can think of, Dolby True HD, DTS-HD. The good stuff for low profile design HTPCs. It comes with HDMI and S/PDIF outputs.

A product in the works is the Xonar Essence ST (not STX). A new card which we'll share some details on real soon with 124dB signal to noise ratio, AMI shield and everything Dolby you can think of.

ASUS is also addressing the budget soundcard segment soon. Expect this Xonar DS to sell for roughly 40-50 USD. Again a prototype product which we'll preview/review real soon. It still packs a lot of performance for money, comes with 107 dB SNR and is just much better than any onboard integrated sound solution we see on motherboards these days.