Review on ASUS XONAR SE 5.1 Channel 🔊 Hi-Res Sound Card with Windows 10 Compatibility by Jim Acquista

Huge disappointment given the significant improvement in sound quality over the ALC1150 chipset. While the card works well most of the time, I cannot in good faith recommend this device as it occasionally tends to cause audio glitches and freezes apps trying to output audio. There are no warnings or errors in the system event log, it just stops working until you reboot the system. I'm running Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit with the latest driver 10.0.01.10 (also 64-bit). Sometimes the Xonar Audio Center disappears, other times the device seems to work normally although it cannot switch outputs (at this point the software freezes). gets 1 star. I'm also disappointed with the way Windows handles buggy audio hardware (it doesn't, for example), but that's not the reason for my low rating. I've been using this card every day for the past 21 days and have had this issue 6 times which required an immediate computer restart to resolve the issue. Disabling, disabling, reinstalling the driver didn't do anything. If I had to guess, I'd say the card went into a bad hardware state from which it can't recover until power is removed.