Any point in buying a sound card for a quad core system?

uber soldat · 4 Nov 2007 at 18:04

As the main reason i used to buy a soundcard was to take workload off the CPU but this hardly seems relevant with Quad Core system

Hxc · 4 Nov 2007 at 19:05

If you are using decent speakers or headphones you will notice the carpness of onboard sound, especially if you have a gigabyte board, from experience.

Aero · 4 Nov 2007 at 19:25

i have a gigabyte mobo and I can definatley say get one! u'll think "why the @~: was I using onboard!?!?!" ....true story

Greenlizard0 · 4 Nov 2007 at 19:42

It kind of depends on what you use your machine for. If it's for gaming, movies, music playback then you'll notice the difference. The Creative X-Fi's are certainly not the best, but they're still better than on board sound.

Andeh · 4 Nov 2007 at 22:55

get a sound card! The only reason I use my onboard sound at the moment is because I don't have the Digital I/O device for my Audigy 4, so I can't connect my 5.1 amp/speaker system.

uber soldat · 5 Nov 2007 at 09:31

I will mainly use it for gaming, have not bought a card for ages and my knowledge of soundcards is not up to date, what sound card would you recommend (only able to use a 2.0 speaker setup at the moment due to space restrictions

Columbo · 5 Nov 2007 at 09:36

Its not really about the load on the CPU to be honest, its about getting rid of the god awful on-board sound.

balls · 5 Nov 2007 at 21:56

ManCuBuS said:
Its not really about the load on the CPU to be honest, its about getting rid of the god awful on-board sound.

Honestly asking in this part of the forum with the audiophiles about there is only one answer you're going to get. Technically a soundcard is not needed to take the load of the cpu, as the drain it will take is next to nothing anyway.

Massive Attack · 5 Nov 2007 at 22:24

you will notice a big diffenrce getting a soundcard compared with the crappy onboard, as said above it wont take any load off of the cpu as it hardly uses any cou power at all

Uriel · 5 Nov 2007 at 23:36

Just had to remove my Audigy 2, probably due to some sort of hardware conflict. Even on the not particularly spectacular Medusas I can tell the difference between that and onboard. On anything Audiophile it's night and day in terms of sound quality.

Didn't notice much of a drop in performance with onboard though.