When playing games, the most important factors are that your sound card supports the appropriate technology, and secondly that the impact of having sound enabled does not cost you too many frames per second. Obviously, all sound cards use CPU cycles, but some are far more costly than others. Run some benchmarks with or without your integrated solution and I dare say many of you will be running to your local store to buy a proper PCI solution.
In terms of supported technology and effects, the NX does not fail to impress, with all relevant technology both Creative and otherwise supported. Enabling EAX effects in Unreal Tournament greatly improved how immersive the game felt.
To see how the NX impacts the speed of the games, I loaded up Quake III, almost a totally CPU-dependant benchmark these days, and tested it with the Audigy NX vs its PCI based compatriot, the Audigy 2 ZS. You might be interested to know that unlike the PCI solutions, the NX features no 3D sound hardware acceleration, burdening the CPUs processor instead.
Overall you can see that using the NX provides a 10% drop in performance vs using a dedicated 3D hardware processor. Whilst this wont be of concern in the likes of Quake III arena, for something like Halo where your game may already be running at under 30fps in places, it may be of more concern. That said, considering the NX is an external USB sound card, I am very pleased with the CPU utilisation shown. If you must have the ultimate gaming PC, then you are unlikely to be using a SFF or laptop in any case.
