Review on 🎧 ASUS Strix RAID DLX 7.1 PCIe Gaming Sound Card - Enhanced with High-Performance Headphone Amp (600ohm), Audiophile-Grade DAC, and 124dB SNR by Bradley Stewart

I bought this card about 2 weeks ago and sent it back to exchange for the Soundblaster. Below I explain why. The card itself is good. As far as I know the sound quality is good and I like the aesthetics. The only thing I have regarding the looks is that the connectors for the connectors are all the same color. I know it's not a big deal, but it helps a lot if you look at the back of the PC at an angle to see the color ring. The fancy glowing eye doesn't matter unless you're looking at your case from below or you have a custom case with a non-standard ATX orientation so it has very little impact on the score. The main reason I'm returning this is for driver support. The drivers for this device were last updated by ASUS in February 2017, more than 5 months ago. I had an issue where I could hear DirectSound through the speaker ports but not through the headphone jack, either through a hub or directly through the card. I could hear other sounds just fine, but DirectSound audio (like Rocket League or other games) didn't get through to my headphones. The only way to fix this is to uninstall and reinstall the drivers. Since this happened at least twice a day, this was not an acceptable workaround. People on the forums have reported this behavior and have been greeted with "We will forward this to our driver team for investigation". Well I don't know if their driver team is busy or unable to solve the problem but at this point I made my decision as I still have the choice to choose another supplier. Not only that, the mic struggled to reconnect every time I had to switch between devices. I would have to unplug and plug the card back in for the mic to work again. Sometimes switching even crashed the active program. In short, there are people for whom this product works and stays out of the box. But there's a large segment of people who get it and it works out of the box, but not always to the point where they're better off using onboard audio. I haven't even bothered to reach the support channels as far as I can tell other users have had no luck other than getting an RMA which doesn't solve anything because the problem is the drivers anyway.