The retail package of Asus Xonar DX is much smaller that what we had seen with Asus Xonar D2 series. You can buy Asus Xonar DX at the retail price of ~$89.99. This is around 50% cheaper than the Asus Xonar D2.

The contents are carefully enclosed in a plastic anti-static bag:

Don't expect to find any fancy stuff here. Only the basics are included in the retail box:

• 1x XonarTM DX 7.1 Channel PCI Express Audio Card
• 1x Driver CD (including Portable Music ProcessorTM Lite and RMAA V6.0.6 utilities)
• 1x S/PDIF TOSLINK optical adaptors
• 1x Quick Start Guide

The card itself is much smaller that the Asus Xonar D2.

The card supports the PCI-e v1.0 slots but it should be also powered by a 4pin power cable of your PC’s power supply unit. The card cannot operate without this power supply.

Many input/outputs are provided:

- Analog Output Jack: 3.50mm mini jack *4 (Front/Side/Center-Subwoofer/Back)
- Analog Input Jack: 3.50mm mini jack *1 (Shared by Line-In/Mic-In)
- Other line-level analog input (for TV Tuner or CD-ROM): Aux-In (4-pin header on the card)
- Digital S/PDIF Output: High-bandwidth TOS-Link optical transmitter (shared with Line-In/Mic-In jack) supports 192KHz/24bit
- Front Panel Header: Headphone / Stereo Speaker Out / Microphone In

The audio connectors are gold plated.

The "heart" of the audio card is the Asus AV100 Audio processor. While the AV100 name is rather misleading, the real manufacturer is CMedia (Oxygen HD chipset).

The DX uses the CS4398 and CS4362A digital-to-analog converters by Cirrus Logic, with 114~120 dB. Asus previous model ( Xonar D2) was equipped with Burr Brown DACs by Texas Instruments with 23 dB SNR: