Even though my motherboard advertises an ALC1220 chip with 120 dB SNR, it's near useless for external amplification because it's susceptible to interference from everything else in the PC. Moving the mouse causes a 1 kHz tone and it's harmonics to play through the speakers.

Don't buy it.It is detected as an usb device by windows 10, which means there are no sound output.

This particular sound card is nonsense. After years of owning a range of Creative products (xfi, audigy 1,2,3, SBZ, etc), I decided to give the Asus Xonar 7.1 card a try on a freshly built system. I have never been so unimpressed by a sound card in my 25+ years of PC using.

Have used Xonar for about 10 years, have two desktop PC's and both use Xonar, a DS and now an upgrade to the AE. Superb sound and configures well with Xorg drivers of Linux. Windows is great to have the frontend application to tweak and use the sound manager.