It used to be back in my early days of computer building you absolutely had to have a sound card. Not that there weren't motherboards with embedded sound cards there was,the problem was they were horrible pieces of hardware. Often times when you had issues with your computer regarding sound, you point the blame on the embedded sound card. There were even instances where your embedded sound card on your motherboard would cause your computer to crash to oblivion,the dreaded blue screen of death often would follow.
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Today Sound card chips on motherboards have come a long way,most of them that's constructed onto motherboards today deliver high end sound rendering the physical sound card useless. From time to time though there are some soundcards that come upon the market that peaks some interest,because guess what,soundcards in general believe it or not is still relevant and alive today.
The Devil HDX (interesting name) Sound Card made by PowerColor has peaked my interest. PowerColor are widely known for making the best add-in-board around and have partnered with AMD which gave the company the added boost to construct cases and power supplies, they make some pretty nice devices.They have now ventured in to wonderful world of sound cards.
The Devil HDX can connect via PCIe and can either take up on e or two slots. Here's wheres it gets interesting, the sound card though it can take up two slots all depends on the user who might want to install its included daughterboard which has analog (4 x 3.5mm) surround sound outputs and a microphone jack. Without the daughterboard, the card has a quarter-inch headphone jack,two analog RCA jacks for stereo, an RCA SPDIF output, and an optical SPDIF output. The sound card itself is completely covered in a EMF shield.
Other features are a switchable OP-AMPs,very high quality capacitors, a Cmedia CM8888 audio processor, and aWolfson WM8741 DAC . The figuration can drive headphones with up to 600 Ohm. The RCA jacks are rated at 124 dB SNR, the headphones also has a 120 dB with a supplied OP-AMPs. The driver interface is call "Xear" and it includes SIO 2.2 support.
The Devil HDX release date is not listed,according to sources will dawn the market soon maybe next month and its will retail for $159.