Auzentech has managed to create quite a stir in the sound card market with the use of high-end OPAmp's and solid capacitors. It created even more of a stir when it announced it was working on a sound card based on the Creative X-Fi audio chip and this is the first third party X-Fi card on the market. Now a picture has finally appeared of the card and it looks quite interesting. It doesn't have the special connector on the rear for Creative's external break out box, but this was hardly expected. On the other hand it features both coaxial and optical S/PDIF due to a special solution where the middle of the coaxial connector doubles up as a 3.5mm optical S/PDIF.

The card supports 7.1-channel analogue outs as well as a mic and line in jack. It's also got a connector for front audio on cases, which is something I've been wanting on a sound card for a long long time. The card also has a 40-pin connector for additional accessories, but it's not clear what this is for at this time and hopefully we'll find out more at Computex. It appears that the Prelude has X-RAM as it's been outfitted with 64MB of memory, which is great news for gamers and hopefully game developers will start making better use of this feature in the future. Auzentech is using ADC and DAC's from AKM and this should allow for very high signal quality from the Prelude card. There's no new information on the Auzentech site at the moment about this card, but we'll bring you more info as soon as we have it.

You can find the Auzentech website here