Posted on Wednesday, June 03 2015 @ 16:37 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Some more information has been revealed about the MSI
X99A GODLIKE Gaming motherboard and it seems this model will incorporate pretty decent onboard audio. TechPopwerUp
noticed the motherboard has two DACs:
an ESS Sabre 124 dBA SNR chip to handle the front-out and headphone channels and a Realtek ALC1150 (115 dBA SNR) for the other analog channels in a 7.1-channel setup.
The way this works is that the Realtek chip is wired to the HDA channel of the PCH, while offloading select channel D/A conversion to the Sabre chip. Further downstream to this chip is a 600? headphones amplifier chip by TI. Even the other analog channels have amplifier circuits. Signal loss is prevented by Nichicon Muse electrolytic capacitors. The CODEC and DAC are capped by an inner EMI shield, and the board's outer metal shroud; and is isolated from the ground-layer of the rest of the board. This solution also features Nahimic, a sound quality enhancing DSP used in the defense and aerospace industries. All analog jacks feature gold-plating. Digital outputs include optical TOSLINK. Unrelated to the audio solution, the X99-GODLIKE also features a special USB port meant for headsets, that has additional electrical stabilizers.
