Do you need a sound card on your PC? Probably not. Unless, of course, you’re a music producer, an audiophile looking to squeeze the best sound quality out of your machine, or a gamer looking to get every sound advantage your setup can muster. The latter group is unabashedly what the Fosi C3 Gaming Sound Card is going after.
How does it help gamers? According to the outfit, the soundcard is designed to boost less prominent in-game sound cues, such a footsteps and other audio indicators of movement, in a significant manner, making it easier to not just recognize that potential enemies may be approaching, but which direction they are actually coming from. That means, less guessing on your part, allowing you to react faster and take on better positions without wasting too much time.
The Fosi C3 Gaming Sound Card is an external sound card, so you can keep it right on the desk for easily plugging in your gaming headset. The outfit claims it uses audiophile-grade components to deliver stellar sound quality. For games, specifically, this means it’s able to reveal subtle details from the in-game audio, giving the sound depth and realism without altering their original design. According to the outfit, it can boost the sound of footsteps by three to nine decibels, making it easy to hear even the feintest sound cues during your online FPS encounters.
While boosting footsteps and other lighter sound cues, the sound card is designed to leave gunshots and explosions as they are. That means, you can boost the sounds you want without having to be inundated with the even louder versions of the already jarring sounds in the game. From what we can tell, it seems to be using a local AI called StepSense to do this. Trained on extensive FPS audio data, this system is, basically, responsible for determining which sounds need to be boosted and which ones to leave alone. Hopefully, AI doesn’t fail us on this one.
The Fosi C3 Gaming Sound Card has a browser-based app where you can choose from a variety of sound presets, making it easy to manually adjust how the game sounds are delivered. It also allows full EQ adjustment if you prefer fiddling with the sound in greater detail. The soundcard comes with ANC built-in, which you can easily switch on and off via a physical slide switch on the back. Simply put, you can use this to tune out all the noises in your home while you’re gaming without having to upgrade to one of those pricey ANC headphones.
It connects to the PC via a USB-C port, with UAC 2.0 support. The sound card can also take both optical and coaxial inputs. Up top, it gets two sliders, one for the Master Volume and one for the Mic Level, along with four buttons for cycling through the various settings. Other features include an angle top section for comfortable desktop operation (five degrees), an all-aluminum chassis, 3.5mm headphone and mic jacks, and RCA outputs. It’s compatible with Windows, MacOS, and Linux computers, along with game consoles and all sorts of other audio sources.
The Fosi C3 Gaming Sound Card is available now, priced at $129.99.
