Multiple Sound Cards

@if ®afiq · 8 Feb 2006 at 18:13

Is it possible to get two sound cards to work in one machine? At the moment I have a M-Audio sound card which is perfect for my music - but not so for games.

I was thinking about getting an Audigy for games, but thought I'd get your opinions before buying one.

Thanks

benneh · 9 Feb 2006 at 09:00

I wouldnt mind knowing the answer to this too

, i put my delta 1010 in but obviously now i've lost 5.1 in hl2.

Seirrah · 9 Feb 2006 at 09:48

Yeah you can do this

benneh · 9 Feb 2006 at 10:17

Seirrah said:
Yeah you can do this

lol, care to elaborate?

Seirrah · 9 Feb 2006 at 12:00

Well you just install both soundcards in seperate PCI slots using the relevant drivers etc. You then have two cards plugged into your pc, and can confirm this on device manager.
Then you need to specify which card you want applications to use, you do this in the application itself. For example in Winamp you'd specify to use your 'music' card, and in games you can often select the soundcard.

There might be some issues with some games not allowing you to choose your device when ingame (I've never really looked into this), but I imagine it might use the card set as the windows primary card, so it'd be a case of selecting it in control panel or something.

benneh · 9 Feb 2006 at 12:26

Ahh, sounds good. Problem there though is that a lot of music apps will automatically go for the windows default jobbie too. But no doubt it will be better than this.

Seirrah · 9 Feb 2006 at 13:20

Yeah I think the best option is having the primary windows card as the gaming card, as you can't always specify the card you want to use.

Then in the music applications you can select the 'music' card. I don't personally know of any music apps where I can't specify the card, but I don't use too many myself.