EVGA Nu Audio Sound Card Review

Performance

Music

I’m a big heavy metal fan, and I love a good bit of old-school prog rock too. This is often quite a demanding thing to ask any audio hardware to replicate. There are often very tight bass frequencies, a lot of texture and detail in the mid-range for the crunch of guitars and the hum of some Moog synths, and plenty going on in the high-end too for the vocals and other instruments. However, throwing on more than a few of my favourite album proved no issue for the Nu Audio. For PC usage, I rely on onboard audio with the ALC1220 chipset, which is admittedly pretty fantastic actually. However, there’s a noticeable leap in quality overall. There’s more power, depth, and detail to the sound. This is most noticeable on FLAC and DSD audio files too. However, even watching a bit of naff quality YouTube content sounded noticeably improved.

Movies

This is a tricky one, as the line-out is purely stereo, which is fine for most desktop setups. However, I can only get 5.1 through the optical output, which has a limited bit depth anyway. You won’t find Atmos and DTS:X over optical, as this is a digital signal that requires HDMI (at least). Regardless though, the sound quality is sublime. I watch a few big movies scenes that I often test with. The one that stood out was The Battle of Pelennor Fields from Return of the King. That certainly delivered the cinematic womp I was hoping for. It certainly gave my floor standing speakers a reason to shout. However, even on my 2.0 desktop setup, there was a reassuring clarity in the mid and high-end frequencies.

Gaming

Honestly, the movie performance and the gaming performance felt about the same, and both performed spectacularly. However, games were even more noticeably improved when using headphones. The chipset on my motherboard and my headphones are hardly crap to being with. However, the built-in headphone amp and processing on the Nu Audio really adds a lot of depth and detail that you wouldn’t realise was missing until you heard it was there. It’s also capable of driving my headphones louder and harder, while also maintaining more detail at lower volumes. If you have a 3.5mm jack on your microphone, you can line-in to this too, ensuring you’re voice chat is at the best possible quality. Keep in mind, many games will have their own audio limitations.

Atmos?

I often use things like Dolby Atmos Headphone processing on Windows 10. This works absolutely fine with the Nu Audio. However, keep in mind it limits the quality to 16 bit 48kHz for some reason. Admittedly it still sounds great. However, for DSD audio and other high-resolution audio scenarios, you’ll want to disable this to ensure you’re getting the best from the Nu Audio soundcard. Either way, you still benefit from the low-noise, high-performance headphone drivers, and that’s no bad thing.