http://www.razerzone.com/tiamat/en/soundcards

I have purchased a Razer Tiamat 7.1, now I want to purchase a sound card for 7.1

This is the first time I have ever looked at a dedicated soundcard, I have been using onboard sound card all my life (that comes with the motherboard).

Does anyone have any skill in this area and can explain things to a newbie or give recommendations as to which sound card is the best buy for my headphones?

Thanks,
Oh_Man.

Okay so ignoring the fact you bought Razer headphones, the top dog of consumer soundcards is the ASUS Xonar series.

Razer is compareable to a music band and their fan-shirts.
Their mainproduct might be good, gaming mouses that is, but the shirt is like to support razer, but is itself not worth the money.

No, really. I would not recommend Razer for any sounddevice.

I would go for Asus Xonar. Most of the time, it has a better price/performance than creative's, but Xonar can be a pain to be installed.
Currently having a xonar for low money and it is one of the best soundcards I have ever had.
(Also, doesn't Creative stop supporting for their soundcards quite quickly? Like 2 years -> too old, won't support or something)

I bought a xonar for my last build and it's been working flawlessly. I second the xonar bandwagon.

But there are three xonars on that page:

Asus Xonar DS PCI 7.1 Sound Card $41
Asus Xonar DX PCIe 7.1 Sound Card $70
Asus Xonar D1 7.1 PCI Sound Card $90

I'm assuming the 90 dollar one is the best one, but what are the differences, and which one should I go with, keeping in mind I have a Razer Tiamat 7.1 headphone.

That should link you to the Asus Xonar Essence STX. Since you're on the other side of the world the signal must be getting all jammed and confused in the internet tubes.

Your link is of a Xonar sound card that not only isn't on the list, but also costs $190.

What makes it worth it compared to the three Xonar sound cards on the list, keeping in mind that my sound card will be used with a Razer Tiamat 7.1 (is the sound card only as good as the headphone, or is the headphone only as good as the soundcard? I dont know.).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829271007
I prefer the HT Omega cards myself, and this is one I've had my eye on for a long time. If I was buying for me, and I over-buy on anything tech related, this would be my pick.

I wonder nobody brought that up before, but what are you even expecting from your sound card?

For example dedicated cards often have capabilities to do hardware sound altering operations or conversions, accept and mix multiple audio streams etc., but simply for 7.1 playback you need nothing. Onboard sound chip would be enough.
Maybe you want fancy enhancements that upmix non-7.1 signals? I'm not sure, but I would expect there's software for it.
Or you want higher sound fidelity? Maybe studio quality for post processing? Then you should go for a dedicated sound card, but it doesn't have to be expensive. Just make sure it's shielded, uses low-noise components and has supports the sampling rate you want.

Also keep in mind that 80-90% of the sound quality is governed by your playback device (Razer Tiamat 7.1 in your case) so there's no point in buying a super high quality sound card when the speakers are shit.

Yeah exactly. I don't even know what half of the things you said even mean. I want high quality sound, but as you said it seems the headphones are the bottleneck, not the sound card itself, in terms of quality of sound. So I should just get the cheapest 7.1 card possible, right?

Loss in sound quality is additive. So even when you have the crappiest speakers using a bad sound card will deteriorate the experience further. Using better cables is also a concern (optical would be ideal, or at least twisted pair), as is the sound source (e.g. youtube will never sound good).

So you can view it as a chain. And each piece in the chain will add noise and other undesirable effects, but will affect the total noise by a different percentage.

However, question is how much of not-added-noise is worth your money to you. And that is entirely subjective and depends on how small of "sound errors" you would even notice. So the best way to go about this would be to test the sound cards in question in your own environment and hear for yourself, or at least compare in a store. If that is out of the question you need to take a wild guess how good you're able to detect "sound errors" and buy according to that.

Since you're just interested playback that is as true as possible to the sound source (if I understood you correctly) you need to compare shielding and noise factors of the sound cards. Any decent review should say something about that.
But keep in mind any dedicated sound card will already be somewhat decent in that respect and it's not too audible in the first place.

Sorry this is a lot of just general information and I can't just tell your what to pick, but that's because I have never done research about sound products, I just understand the theory.

Thanks for the help everyone.