Price Paid : £45 (Inc vat)  Postage : £8.50 (next day)

Purchased from : ebuyer.com

 

Unhappy with my current sound card i decided it was time to find a new one, my main goal was to get something i could use for gaming,  movies and ventrilo without compromising on quality by having an External USB card.

 

The main reason i purchased the xonar was for gaming and ventrilo on Vista 64bit, it has a one mic input and one headphone out but also comes with a S/PDIF optical out connector (that plugs into the headphone socket). The unit feels quite well built, initially from all the photographs i had seen i thought it was made of Plastic, but it is metal (possibly die cast) and has a very nice sleek finish. 

 

 

when i tried to get the unit going i was a bit disappointed, yes it does come with vista 64 bit drivers but installing them and getting them to work is no easy task, there is a splash screen that pops up whilst the installation of the drivers is going on in the background which stops you getting back onto the desktop or even the task manager, then because i have another sound card installed (creative xfi) A command prompt box appears asking me if i want to disable the sound blaster so it can install the Asus drivers, It is almost impossible to alt tab back to this screen and the only way i could read it was by closing the splash screen with task manager which was trial and error because i could not see it. I then decided to dump the drivers on the cd and got the ones from the Asus web site, this was the same deal as before but this time i just pressed Y (yes) to shutoff the xfi and rebooted. 

 

Now to the software, After rebooting i was greeted by and error message that said "Cm112eye.exe" had stopped working and it needed to close, this was very annoying since cm112eye.exe apparently controls the volume knob, the sound card did work though albeit with limited functionality (i had to restart the Audio Center software manually).

After about an hour of googling the Fault "KERNEL32.dll!SMapLS" i found out that a file in windows is to blame, the file is called : "Winmm.dll" and is located in : 

"C:\windows\system", Renaming this file to "winmm.dll.old" stopped the volume control program crashing (and fixed the audio center which was dependant on cm112eye.exe).

One thing i did notice though,  the volume knob gets Stuck at 92% if its turned up all the way, it wont go down past 92% unless its changed in software, Asus support did reply to my help calls but did not give me enough assistance with my problem, they don't even bother posting on their own Forums when people ask for help, after sending messages back and forth Asus told me to RMA the Xonar for a fault that is to do with there software, Not good.