Steel Series Siberia USB Soundcard

Product Features

  • 7.1 Virtual Soundcard, an improved Alternative to your standard on board soundcard
  • 12 channel equalizer for tweaking personal preferences
  • USB adaption for gamers who use multiple sound options.

Average Price $40.00

Recomended? Yes

 

We originally looked at reviewing the Siberia USB Soundcard for gamers who like to run their game sounds through their speakers, but wanted to keep their voice chat going through a headset. This is easy if you’ve got a USB headset, but for someone who already has a great 3.5mm analog headset, it’s hard to split the sound.

That’s where the Siberia comes in. Using this USB sound card will allow you to run your voice chat (Ventrillo, Teamspeak, etc) through the sound card, and therefore through your headset, while keeping your game sound through your speakers.

Setup was a breeze, with a quick update from the Siberia website updating the drivers to the latest version. In our testing, we found that the Siberia gave excellent sound quality, with voice chat coming through very clearly.

Although it wasn’t the focus of our testing, we also ran the card through some sound tests with iTunes, as well as a few movies, and found that the sound quality was very good in those situations as well.

We were also very impressed with the ease of use while gaming, with mute mic, mute sound, and volume controls buttons on the top of the device.  Very handy when our headsets built in mute button was very clunky to use.

Overall, this is a great option for MMO players looking for that extra sound device through which to run their voice chat, and for laptop gamers who want something with a lot more “umph” then their onboard sound delivers.