ASUS Xonar U1 USB Audio Station

Test system Used:
C2d 4300
2Gig, DDR2-800
GA-P35-DS3L
ATI-1950-Pro VIVO

This round of tests illustrates the audio devices load on the CPU during simulated gaming audio output. A device which supports hardware processing will measure very low. An audio device with software processing will measure higher due to the CPU overhead required for software processing.

This card does a very good job of maintaining low CPU overhead during gaming audio. These tests only examine the lower EAX 1 and 2 standards and no OpenAL hardware testing. This application cannot give a full picture but does give one an idea as to the overhead this card would need when gaming.

I have spent about two weeks with this unit testing and running it through its paces. There were zero errors during the entire testing time.

I performed some recording and the tracks were clean and clear. I have personally always liked Dolby Headphone and found myself using it more and more during the review and during gaming. Considering the U1 can act as a dedicated headphone amp, it really gave some oomph to anything I was listening to over the headphones.

I also used this card to connect my laptop to my home stereo and it gave nice sound quality when used in this context.

This unit is designed to be solid and disassembly is likely to cause damage. The only modding options I could see are to remove the LM358 and use another chip amp of higher quality and possibly to extend the USB cable for HTPC use. I do not recommend modding this unit in any way.