Subsystem Testing
Sound Hardware
The ASUS TUF GAMING X570 PLUS (WI-FI) uses a Realtek ALC S1200A 8-channel high definition audio CODEC. It does feature shielding, dedicated PCB layers, and audio-grade capacitors. This is a typical CODEC for the price point.
Realtek® ALC S1200A 8-Channel High Definition Audio CODEC
Audio Feature :
- Exclusive DTS Custom for GAMING Headsets.
- Audio Shielding: Ensures precision analog/digital separation and greatly reduced multi-lateral interference
- Dedicated audio PCB layers: Separate layers for left and right channels to guard the quality of the sensitive audio signals
- Premium Japanese audio capacitors: Provide warm, natural and immersive sound with exceptional clarity and fidelity
- Audio Cover: Effective shielding preserves the integrity of audio signals to ensure the best quality.
Audio – Subjective Listening
The audio playback quality was adequate. The sound quality didn’t blow me away or anything, but I didn’t expect it would.
Audio – Subjective Recording / Playback
With the microphone boost option enabled, the audio playback was relatively free of distortion, though the audio levels were lower than I expected.
DPC Latency
For those who may not know what DPC is, I’ll explain. Deferred procedure calls are a function within Windows that allows higher priority tasks such as device drivers to defer lower priority tasks for execution at later times. It’s an interrupt and reassignment of sorts performed by the operating system.
DPC latency varies from board model to model and brand to brand. DPC issues show up in the form of audio dropouts and streaming video issues. Naturally, this is something that the enthusiast would want to avoid. I used LatencyMon and let it run for 10 minutes to graph the results. I have compiled a list of several systems I’ve tested over the last year and placed the results in a graph for easy reference.
The ASUS TUF GAMING X570 PLUS (WI-FI) does really well here. It achieves the second-lowest DPC latency we’ve seen in our recent testing. However, the GIGABYTE Z490 Aorus Master is still king in this test for now.