Re: Looking for cheap, good, well supported PCI-X soundcard

Andreas Grois wrote:
Since I bought a "new" mainboard with nforce 4-chipset, I'm
unable to play any games under wine (well, I'm one of Blizzards
WoW-victims) with sound enabled. I don't know if it's a problem of the
onboard soundchip or the linux-driver for it (CONFIG_SND_INTEL8X0), but
everytime a sound is played back, the framerate drops from 50 to about 5
(so I have to disable sound when playing). I didn't have that problem with
my old VIA K8T890-chipset.

VIA AC'97 controllers can do mixing and sample rate conversion in
hardware, but Intel-compatible ones cannot. Apparently, the software
mixing of either the game or of Wine is, er, inefficient. I'd guess
that Wine's DirectX emulation is the culprit.

Do you know any cheap PCI-express soundcard (since the only free PCI-slot
of my mainboard is the one directly below the graphics-card -> installing
anything there would block the GPU-fan), that has a good old stereo
output, hardware-samplerate-conversion, multi-channel-playback (of
course hardware-mixing) and is well supported by current linux-kernels?

Current Linux kernels do not support any PCI-E sound card.

Creative builds a PCI Express x1 model of the X-Fi line that also has
hardware mixing, but currently there is only a closed-source 64-bit beta
driver. It is unlikely that there will ever be an open source driver.

The Asus Xonar D2X is PCI-E x1 too, but is not yet available. A driver
is currently being written and will probably be part of the 2.6.25
kernel. (This card does not support hardware mixing, but instead you
get important features such as 192 kHz support and colorfully
illuminated jacks.)


Regards,
Clemens
.

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