Before the X-Fi Titanium card, I had a X-Fi XtremeGamer card. It was a second hand card that I bought from Ebay. The hardware was fine, but the drivers gave me so much trouble. So I sold it used onboard Realtek ALC892 audio on my old board for a while.
But then I bought a Roccat Kave 5.1 headset and I wanted to get a decent audio card to suit it. Of course I could continue to use the onboard audio. But I thought it was underperforming because of the Realtek chip. But I made the mistake of going with another X-Fi card. Again, second hand, but this time it was the Titanium edition. But there were PAX drivers available, so I thought things would turn out better than last time. It actually did, but there were still some minor hiccups. Few times the audio completely stopped working, and reinstalling the drivers fixed it. And one day this happened as well.
Then there was another issue. I bought a SilverArrow SB-E Extreme air cooler. I had my audio card set up in the top most PCI-E x1 slot so that the video card would have all the breathing room. But with this cooler, the top most PCI-E slot became unusable. For the time being, I moved it to the bottom most slots. It's a PCI-E x16 slot but running at x4 speeds. By moving it to the left of the video card (remember, the cards are installed vertically in the Raven RV-03, so on other cases it would be below the video card. The intake fan would be on the bottom where as in the Raven RV-03, it is on the back.) It's the summer these days, and I need to give all the cool air I can to do video card. The audio card was in the way of the airflow.
So when I decided that I was going to upgrade to Haswell, I knew that had to look for a board that either allowed me to install a audio card in the top most PCI-E x1 slot or came with pretty good integrated audio. But I soon found out that it would be impossible to find a motherboard that doesn’t get the top most PCI-E x1 slot blocked by the cooler. Thus I decided that I had to buy a motherboard with great audio. Not just what the manufacturers advertise as great (ASRock and MSI audio seems bad, although advertise them as being great.) The board that was within my range with the best audio was the Asus ROG Maximus VI Hero. And I went with it.
