Asus Xonar SE problems

Snot Shot · 18 Aug 2020 at 17:40

Avid PC gamer here and most of my life I have been using on board sound due to always having something wrong with dedicated SC that I tried. Kinda happy even with MSI B450 TOMAHAWK MAX (Socket AM4) DDR4 ATX board and the sound I am getting, but out of the blue decided to try dedicated sound card again. Went with Asus Xonar SE from OC. Just before purchase I said to myself "you asking for trouble".
Guess what? Got it today and installed:

Sound freezes up and stutters when playing YT and occasionally video pauses by itself? However, it does not freeze up or stutter if you watch live stream. Very odd.
Freezes up and stops music when playing via media player
Microphone records stutters too
Stutters when playing system sounds

Running windows 10. Unistalled and re-installed via CD and after downloading drivers from the web, nothing.
Tried changing playback devices on all apps still makes no difference. No errors or anything, everything is working correctly according to sys info. Not sure on Xonar audio controll app either, it offers...nothing.

Any ideas guys? Can it be faulty?

Thank you

james.miller · 18 Aug 2020 at 17:43

There are compatibility issues with am4 unfortunately.

More info and possible solutions here :
http://maxedtech.com/asus-xonar-cards-and-amd-ryzen-am4-motherboards-compatibility-report/

Snot Shot · 18 Aug 2020 at 18:03

Haha! my luck again :] Thank you for such quick response.
I am not too keen on going through listed solutions as none of them are fairly straight forward or simple.
Where do I stand with OC on returning this for a refund or exchange to different card?

Oh and any recommendations for something up to £50 please?

Many thanks

lord filbuster · 18 Aug 2020 at 20:08

I have a xonar d2x, which also has the AM4 incompatibility issue, but your problem sounds different. I think the AM4 issue normally just causes hard reboots when you install the card. I think the official drivers for the xonar SE are a bit outdated, and don't play nice with windows 10 in general, so it might be worth trying the unixonar drivers, to see if it fixes the issue. They should install just like a normal set of drivers, you don't need to mess around with windows security settings or anything odd. http://maxedtech.com/asus-xonar-unified-drivers/. You'd want these ones UNi Xonar W10 1825 v1.81a r2.

If that doesn't work you should be able to just return it to OCUK. The Xonar AE is about a tenner more and uses a different audio chipset, so I don't think it has the same issues, at least from a quick google. It's more or less comparable to the SE from what I can see as well.

Snot Shot · 19 Aug 2020 at 09:34

Alright, thank you. I will give unified drivers a go first and see what happens. Thanks again!

Snot Shot · 4 Sep 2020 at 11:37

Little update if anyone interested.
So I have returned my Asus Xonar SE for a full refund due to incompatibility issues with AM4 boards. Efficient and straight forward process with OC team so thank you. Couple days of thinking, reading reddit and OC forums I went against majority advise that these days your motherboard onboard sound is more than enough unless you are an audiophile. I got Sound Blaster Z external souncard and if I said the difference in sound volume and quality is huge would be an understatement.
So my SBZ's are driving my G PRO X and what a difference, no match for the DAC that came with the headset and onboard "Realteks" are kinda useless to be honest.
So what gives? My G PRO's are far from high end headphones and my MSI B450 board is far from bottom of the range, but its still equals to **** poor sound quality unless you get decent external soundcard?

foster grant · 4 Sep 2020 at 12:25

Did you not give the unified drivers a try ?

Snot Shot · 4 Sep 2020 at 15:15

foster grant said:
Did you not give the unified drivers a try ?

I will be honest, no I did not. After having all the issues I uninstalled it and packed it back into the box ready to be returned. Then I came here asking for advise/help and kinda did not want re-install eveything again in case its just a "patch up" job.
I ordered Sound Blaster Z through OC too and what a difference compared to onboard sound! Works great and I do love the software!

foster grant · 4 Sep 2020 at 23:13

Snot Shot said:
I will be honest, no I did not. After having all the issues I uninstalled it and packed it back into the box ready to be returned. Then I came here asking for advise/help and kinda did not want re-install eveything again in case its just a "patch up" job.
I ordered Sound Blaster Z through OC too and what a difference compared to onboard sound! Works great and I do love the software!

Yeah I hear you onboard sound is not so good I was lucky enough to get myself an STX Sound Card a couple of years back and its on another level to anything I've ever used , although I've also used the SB-Z but I wanted something more to go with my HD600s.