Audio help: Best gaming/movies sound card?

[Apollo4g]

Im running Vista 64.

Hi all, well i have an Xfi xtreme music sound card.
Im not really a sound person but i do love my good quality sound on my movies and games.
(Movies i watch are 720 and 1080 on my pc, .mkv files mostly, donno if it matters)

I was ok with it till i upgraded to an i7 build and now it seems ive tried with a few drivers, but the card keeps turning off randomly and only a restart fixes the issue, or sometimes after 15mins it just comes back on. Very random.Or might be the PCI slot, who knows.

Ive disabled the onboard sound and all with the same results. Im looking for a good non X-fi card that will match my needs.

I was thinking Asus and between the 2 below cards. Looking for a PCI-E x1 card preferably.

Whats the difference between the:
Xonar D2X and Xonar HDAV1.3?

Is the Xonar D2X better for games as stated?

Thanks all!

 

[DarKStar]

I'm using a SoundBlaster X-Fi Fata1ity Xtreme game Professional series - those are the rare cards when they came out to have gold plated connectors - they don't make them anymore. Very clean sound, rock solid and the best card I've had - Excellent for games and movies.

 

[Apollo4g]

thanks for the input.

 

[Nodscene]

You might also want to consider the Prelude. So far I've had zero issues with the drivers under XP64 and Windows 7 32bit, and it is of course an amazing card. Can't help you with the Asus ones as I've never used one nor really read up about them.