Low CPU usage sound cards

keybaud · 19 Aug 2008 at 01:01

Does anyone know a review looking at modern sound cards and their associated CPU usage or isn't this relevant with quad-core CPUs any more?

MikeHunt79 · 19 Aug 2008 at 01:02

I don't really see how one soundcard could use more cpu power than another?

keybaud · 19 Aug 2008 at 01:12

Found a link, at last, but it's not looking at many cards or variants:

http://techgage.com/article/asus_xonar_d2_sound_card/7

Note that under certain conditions one card is at 30% CPU whereas another is only at 10%.

Phatzy · 19 Aug 2008 at 19:09

my backup 7.1 live! card only using 2-5% of cpu, how is the xonar using that much?

ChrissyT88 · 19 Aug 2008 at 20:32

If you are using the xonar's EAX 5.0 (only really used in gaming?) emulation trickery then i would imagine that the cpu usage could be quite high (since all processing is offloaded onto the CPU). CustomPC tested the cpu usage whilst using EAX and gaming and found no impact on frame rate etc when using a quad core. However, for normal usage, the DX uses almost no cpu power as far as i can tell. Most creative cards are able to hardware process EAX, so you should see no cpu usage there. The creative x-fi xtreme audio also offloads a lot of its processing (crystalizer, EAX etc) onto the cpu. I would imagine that with any decent x-fi or xonar you would see almost no cpu usage, or at least none that would affect performance on a quad processor. Dual on the other hand... i wouldnt be so sure (particularly with the xonar and EAX)