Gadgetory

hey YouTube welcome back to tech a city's brain is coming back to you guys today with a review and unboxing of the Zeus zona dgx 5.1 PCI Express sound card now this can be had for about thirty dollars so it is relatively inexpensive and also it does have some features like it has dual dual headphone amps on the rear and the front port but anyway we'll get to the review soon but I'm going to say if you guys want to check out this sound card versus an onboard audio solution the realtek LC 1150 from msi or from Realtek but the onboard audio solution for the msi you can check that out in episode 3 of quest for perfection where i'm going to be comparing this versus the msi onboard audio solution and seeing which gives the best frame latencies and seeing if there's any difference to FPS so you can check that out I put the link in the down in the description below but in the meantime let's get on with the review and check out what this has and what features it has and also I'll be testing at the end of this video the mic in on this because a lot of people want to buy these for streaming so we'll see how good this is versus the realtek ALC 1150 mic in in this review so anyway let's get on with the review okay so here's the product itself once you open the box you get the sound card it actually it's wrapped up just taking it out of the wrapping to make this a little bit faster and smoother so here's the sound card itself this is what you get it's a nice black theme which I must give kudos to azuz for getting that right it really looks good in your when you place it inside a black with a black motherboard black case it blends in well we'll get onto this a little bit later let's have a look what else we get in here so you get a small form-factor bracket so if you wish to install this on a mini ITX case or something like that you can do so with this bracket it also comes with two little screws for doing the low profile bracket mount I won't be needing that though and also it comes with the driver CD the dgx driver CD you can also download the latest drivers from the internet which I'd recommend doing and you get the manual here so it does come packaged pretty well I do kudos to Zeus it is a really nice sort of product to unbox but here's the actual card itself okay so here is a close-up of the card you can see here it features the C media CM 8 7 8 6 dark and a DC that is since it can't be processed via PCI Express directly it's converted by this as media chip here now the HD front panel out audio output you can plug that into this and it will support that it also supports switching as well so if you plug it into the front and you already have something in the rear it will switch the front panel also the it's important to note this has the audio ad is 105 decibels signal noise ratio also the audio end is 103 decibels signal noise anything over 100 it's pretty damn good so this is already winning in that department now the thing to note about the headphone app is that there's two of them so it doesn't matter if you plug it in the front or the rear your headphones going to get amped the mic in however only has one app and that's on the rear so if you're using your mic in on the front panel you may wish to switch it to the rear to get a better signal-to-noise ratio now looking at the rear of the card here you can see that you've got the line mech in there done like a hybrid there and I don't mind cost-cutting when it's smart like that so that's good they've got the front audio out let's just standard audio out point if you're using headphones and also has support for analog surround sounds so if you want to use your front speakers side speakers and your subwoofer you can do that there with those three ports it also has digital out there s/pdif out which you can also use off the front panel so you can also plug in an external if you want to so that's a good feature there overall though the product does look very sleek I like to look at this product it looks very good so now I'm going to install this sound card and I'll do some tests for you guys but it's also important to note that this does come with dolt as you did see that does come with Dolby emulation software so you can emulate 5.1 surround sound and it also has a Zeus's EAX 2.5 which is about they meant to be really good and another thing is to with the headphone apps it will and it can match your ohms on your headphones which is a really good feature so let's move on to I guess I'm just going to test the mic in on this thing for you guys I'm also going to tell you what I think of the sound card after using it yes let's have a look alright so here is a test with the on I mean no sorry the sound cards microphone in this is on the rear this is turned all the way up with microphone boost and it's come no effects at all all completely unedited with the sound so hopefully you guys can hear it it does sound pretty good I don't know I'm going to see for myself anyway I will now compare this to the onboard MSI real tech LC 1150 with MSI's onboard app so we'll compare that now let's do the comparison anyway we'll switch over to the MSI now ok now we have a test with the realtek LC 1150 microphone in this is 30 decibel gain and all the way up just like these loose was hopefully you guys can hear the difference I'm going to be checking I definitely know there is a difference because I have tested this MSI thing before I have tested the mic in so yeah you can probably hear the noise okay let's jump onto the conclusion so this is a 48 killer it's both tests we're down to 48 kilohertz 16 bits are recording and same microphone so let's move on to the conclusion so in conclusion I will say that the Zeus zonar mic in port is a lot better than the onboard audio and keep in mind this is some of the best onboard audio coming out at the moment as well the MSI has the audio boost I mean the output is amazing on the MSI's onboard audio to get me wrong but the mic in is just a little bit weak so I think if you're a streamer and you're looking to get you know a good input on a budget then a sound card like the zuzo not definitely has a place I thought in the audio test though when I compared the azuz sonar to my onboard real tech 1150 I thought the real tech 1150 actually sounded better for music as opposed to the Zeus sounding better for games and this is mainly because I thought the Zeus had higher mids but I thought the real tech 1150 had higher you know more definitive bass and more definitive highs so I thought either way they both won in different areas in terms of output but input definitely went to the zoo so now the mic in is amazing on that thing so I already have a microphone preamp so it doesn't matter which one I use so if you have a good onboard audio solution then I suggest getting maybe a mic preamp if you have a mediocre on board audio solution then the azuz own are definitely is a great solution for you one more thing to note also that the front output the headphone output on the zoo sonar actually was weaker the signal was weaker than the rear the mic input actually was the same on both front and rear so that's surprising enough I thought it would have been the other way around but it actually was the output on the front that was actually weak so there's something if you want to put your headphones in put them into the rear port you'll get a better app output now a lot of people are saying well you know I put it I've used the sound card it makes such a big difference and I think with these people is it's mainly not the fact that the D the digital audio conversion or the audio digital digital conversion is better it's just that the fact that the amps better because the amp on this sound card is good when you compare that to a lot of onboard audio solutions which have weak amps when people put on the headphones they're like oh my god it's so much better that's because they're getting a stronger signal in essence MSI with the realtek 1150 they've actually put in a good headphone amp so I could test these I tested flak music I tested rap mystify my INXS that's an old-school eighties song I tested some deadmau5 and I noticed yeah that at the same sound levels yeah the real tech sounded actually better for music but for gaming I could definitely hear footsteps and voice better especially in music as well I could hear the voices better with the zoo sonar so that's just my thoughts on it overall I will give this product a big thumbs up it's only $30 it is a great solution onboard solution I mean PCI Express solution sorry and it does look nice it's black it looks sleek and it does work as intended so really good features about it so the software I turned it off though as yeah as you know I don't really like playing around with equalizations I like getting a pure signal straight from the source you guys I hope you enjoyed this review if you did please give it a thumbs up and also if you have any questions or comments please leave a comment the comment section below and this is the part where I plead you to sub please subscribe to take your city please yeah hope that worked and I'll catch you guys soon with some more take videos by