With 177 different awards to date for the Xonar line-up, it's time to find out if that figure is going any higher today as we welcome the Xonar DG into our war room.

Asus has established itself as a player in the high rollers' hi-fi lounge with Xonar soundcards like the Xense, D2 and mighty Essence ST. Although still relatively new to the audio game, it can look old timers like Creative and Auzentech in the face without shame.

Affordable, feature packed, 5.1 channel sound, headphone amp and built in S/PDIF, this is the ASUS

Great soundcard. Easy install. Port for front PC headphone jack. Bought headphones to life after suffering cruddy onboard audio. Built in amplifier works well. Not huge amounts of power, but a huge improvemnt will be noticed. Software supplied has an excellent and easy to use equaliser!

Do not hesitate to upgrade your on-board audio to this ASUS Xonar DG. Even with a $300+ mother boards, you are still stuck with Realtek or Cirrus Logic audio chipsets which can not outdo a good quality ASUS Xonar or Creative X-Fi card.

Quality and Price

Interface and digital out

The inclusion of integrated audio solutions on every motherboard pushed discrete audio solutions into the luxury purchase market. So why do...

Clear; Full Body Audio on All Channels; Built-in Headphone AMP Supports Headphones with up to 150 Ohms of impedance; Includes Low Profile Brace for low profile HTPC cases; Well written User's Manual

Included Quick Start Guide is almost useless; Audio Quality not Noticeable with Low Bit-rate Audio Sources

Good quality card, so much better than on board sound. I've always been a fan of Creative Cards, but after trying this one I am mildly impressed. One thing that lets this card down is the Software bundled with it. Creative's software seems just more grown up and sophisticated.

The Xonar DG is a remarkably inexpensive half-height PCI sound card, but it isn't cheap and nasty. With 5.1 analogue surround sound, the obligatory optical S/PDIF output and variable impedance settings so that you can optimise the card's analogue stereo output for various types of headphones, it has...

Excellent value for money

Wouldn't work initially; Asus help was useless; eventually managed to download the latest drivers and it worked; still struggling to get the line in working

Great little upgrade to the audio quality of the system. I'm not making use of the virtual surround sound or anything, I really don't have any interest in it. Primary reason for purchasing this is my on-board audio had issues with static on the microphone and a buzzing sound (in-ear) when my video...

+ Completely eliminated static sound for audio recording; + Much more balanced sound output

- Really gross software interface; and for some reason the Xonar software files aren't digitally signed by Asus so you have to give the software permission to run since Windows sees it as a potentially harmful file