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I'm tired of my EVGA NU Audio Card.

Have you've been having problems with your EVGA Nu Audio Card?


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ThatM1key

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I've been having so many problems with my evga sound card. Heres my list of problems I have with this card.
  1. No Stereo Mix
  2. Janky ASIO Support
  3. Constant crashes when switching from ASIO to DS and Wasapi
  4. Drivers freezes sometimes when watching youtube videos, playing games and even playing music.
  5. Digital Filters sometimes reset to default.

Yes I reinstalled the drivers and reinstalled windows 10. Also Yes I installed the latest and have tried the other versions.
While writing this thread, my driver crashed again.
evga.PNG


Update on my card: I believe its slowly dying now. Its starting to make popping noises, Fun!. I picked this sound card over the Creative AE-5 because it had a better ADC and native DSD. If anybody comes across this thread in the future and evga fixed the "gaming" aspects instead of the main issues, there full of dog shit. I'm going back to my trusty Topping D10. I'm leaning very close to buying that Topping E30.

Update 6-10-20: Its starting to pop every 45sec to 1 minute now.
 
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bravomail

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maybe defective unit. just use external DAC like Schiit Modi 3.
 
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ThatM1key

ThatM1key

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maybe defective unit. just use external DAC like Schiit Modi 3.
I doubt its defective. It does good on a good day. I had a topping d10 but I wanted the ability to record vinyl and other formats.
 

RayDunzl

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jagercola

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I've got one that whenever I play a game or video which uses the video card for rendering, I hear coil whine or noise through my Nu Audio card. Not sure if it's the graphics card or PSU but I've moved slots and still get the whine. Any ideas?
 

dfuller

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Sounds like it's defective to me. EVGA is good about returns and replacments. Shoot them an email.
I've got one that whenever I play a game or video which uses the video card for rendering, I hear coil whine or noise through my Nu Audio card. Not sure if it's the graphics card or PSU but I've moved slots and still get the whine. Any ideas?
Noisy power rail from the motherboard, I'm certain.
 
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ThatM1key

ThatM1key

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Jimmy

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It may be the PC's power supply, if ripple levels are high it may have undesirable effects, if it's a cheap or generic PSU it may be a good idea to try with another one.

Anyway, it may be the motherboard, too, I would try a simple thing to see if it helps. If your motherboard allows it (is it an AMD or Intel build, which brand?), try to disable spread spectrum and/or lock the PCIe bus speed to the maximum supported.

The EVGA NU Audio physically is a PCIe card, but internally it's USB, I think that should they make an external version it would sell well, just for the A/D conversion, although nowadays it would find competition from Motu's M2/M4.

Any suggestions to fix that? Thanks!
 

odyo

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I've got one that whenever I play a game or video which uses the video card for rendering, I hear coil whine or noise through my Nu Audio card. Not sure if it's the graphics card or PSU but I've moved slots and still get the whine. Any ideas?
I have ridiculous amount of coil whine issue but my SBX AE5 picks up none. 100% clean.
 

bravomail

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I doubt its defective. It does good on a good day. I had a topping d10 but I wanted the ability to record vinyl and other formats.

then get external audio interface like Focus Scarlett Gen 3.
 
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ThatM1key

ThatM1key

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ThatM1key

ThatM1key

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Tim6622

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I had different issues with an am4 b350 PC until evga tech Lee M sent me beta drivers in October. The sounds would get glitchy(like mini skips/clipping every other millisecond) after a certain amount use(like after playing a game for an hour), would stop working, and sometimes my comp would reboot out of nowhere. Ever since the new driver was installed, I didn't experience these issues except the shutoff part but that could be something else with my really old power hungry r9 290x
 

Califmike33

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I also bought this card it's just a basket of problems waiting to happen. I'm returning it and going with an external dac,. Hi-Fi audio and sound cards don't mix.
 

Tim6622

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I've ran into and "fixed" (worked around really) similar issue. I switched my nu audio card to another pc. Old pc had a b350f strix, r5 1600,r9 290 trix, evga 650 white psu. I didn't have any problem with the audio card in that setup, it was used with hd58x and an Aiyima ao7 + elac b6.2 setup. Problems like audio/video microstutter started when i moved the r9 290 and the nu audio card to a ga z270x gaming 7 , i3 8350k (coffee lake microcode added to latest bios manually), 550w evag psu, HTPC. Disabled C state in bios. When playing games or watching certain videos stream on certain app i get a/v microstutter. I think it's related to gpu/video streaming (or network?). I already tried a pcie lan card(disable onboard lan) , 14$ ugreen one, and it didn't change anything. I don't have audio stutter while downloading in the background and playing music with foobar, only streaming video or any else that uses Gpu.Another thing is I get more emi than I'd like when gpu is on full load, but my smsl sk10 suffered the same thing connected to the yellow usb port. Some things I've done to work around the microstutter is I use Microsoft edge or the Brave browser since strangely enough, I don't experience any problems while using those browsers and streaming videos. Most problems happen on Firefox. Another thing to note is i use a fio D03K connect to my tv, to transmit analog audio into the line in on evga card (since the evga doesn't have a toslink input like the soundblaster zxr) ; but don't notice any effects with it connected or not for pc playback.
 

chris719

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This card is actually USB internally using its own ASMedia USB host controller chip off of the PCIe bus. ASMedia controllers and drivers are not exactly up to Intel quality, although they have gotten a lot better over the years.

Most people having issues would be better off with an external USB DAC or a true PCIe card like RME and Lynx make.

I would run LatencyMon with it removed and make sure you don't have any other drivers that are misbehaving. If you are getting spikes into the yellow or red they should be addressed first by disabling drivers until you find the culprit. Once that's fixed, reinstall the card and observe again.
 
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ThatM1key

ThatM1key

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Its the audio drivers themselves. EVGA doesn't like to update them anymore. Sometimes I have problems with my Topping E30 but at least I can unplug and replug it in. With this damn if it fucks up, I have to restart my pc. Not even restarting drivers would help or even reinstalling would help.
I would only get it nowadays for its ADC, its somehow still stable while recording. I also don't like how it sips PCI bandwidth from you and and also a slot.
 

chris719

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Its the audio drivers themselves. EVGA doesn't like to update them anymore. Sometimes I have problems with my Topping E30 but at least I can unplug and replug it in. With this damn if it fucks up, I have to restart my pc. Not even restarting drivers would help or even reinstalling would help.
I would only get it nowadays for its ADC, its somehow still stable while recording. I also don't like how it sips PCI bandwidth from you and and also a slot.

That sucks, but I have some doubts it's the drivers. The EVGA card uses an XMOS chip like many other products. The main vendor of XMOS drivers is Thesycon and you can see that they licensed the driver to EVGA after a quick Google search. They have a pretty good track record as far as USB audio devices go. If it were a driver problem, we would expect to see it in the dozens of other products using the XMOS + Thesycon driver combo. While you are having issues, and they can manifest like driver issues, I'm not entirely convinced it's the XMOS drivers. It could easily be firmware or the ASMedia XHCI controller driver having issues on your system.

Take a look below; it doesn't really sip PCIe bandwidth from you, either. It takes a slot, but it's x1 @ Gen 2 speed, and on almost every single consumer PC platform, the x1 slots come off of the chipset. This bandwidth is already shared with every other peripheral off of the chipset through the DMI (Intel) or PCIe (AMD) link to the CPU. This includes your motherboard's USB ports. So, whether this card is installed or you connect an external DAC to a USB port, the bandwidth comes out of the DMI link budget anyway. The only exception is on some AMD boards where 4 of your USB ports may be directly connected to the CPU. The diagrams are for Z490 and X570 but they are representative of both consumer platforms going back a while.

I agree that the whole idea is ill-advised, though.


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