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On Board Sound Saps CPU?

The latest HD onboard sound codecs are actually getting someway towards being semi-decent and competant, however, a good sound card coupled with decent speakers will still produce a better sound, have lower cpu usage, and usually support a fair few more features.

So no, not ALL onboard sound is cack, however virtually all cheap onboard sound is cack, expensive boards with a decent codec will often be moderate, and a good sound card will be be better than all onboard sound.
 
Alexrose1uk said:
The latest HD onboard sound codecs are actually getting someway towards being semi-decent and competant, however, a good sound card coupled with decent speakers will still produce a better sound, have lower cpu usage, and usually support a fair few more features.

So no, not ALL onboard sound is cack, however virtually all cheap onboard sound is cack, expensive boards with a decent codec will often be moderate, and a good sound card will be be better than all onboard sound.
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it is true what you say, but since my mobo only has 2 pci slots , i dont want to commit to only having 1 pci as i have plans for them, so the onboard sound, really is doing great for the convenience , and it is thumping out good sound, good enough for me to make music with.

tbh , it did surprise me at first , in the past i have never had a good experience with an on board solution.
 
Did some Googling as i remember benchmarks where it been shown that onboard sound could reduce FPS by 5% to 10%. I couldn't find the one i was looking for but one site (has links to competitors) showed:

Chronicles of Riddick at 1024 -768
VIA ENVY 24 94 FPS
Audigy 4 Pro 98 FPS
X-Fi Fatailty 98 FPS

I'm not sure how good the the VIA onboard solution is but it 5% slower than the dedicated cards.
 
I to was not going to bother with an additional soundcard thinking that my EVGA 680 would have a decent enough on board sound device. But consider this.. if you was to use the opticle out on these types of boards are you then going to have an improvement in sound over using the line outs as you are not using any digital to analogue conversion and maybe saving some fps to boot?
If i would still benifit from an additional soundcard then i would probably plump for one of the xfi rahnge with the optical i/o adapter.
 
MeatLoaf said:
If it supports EAX effects its hardware accellerated, which is all of the Audigy and X-Fi series apart from the Extreme Audio.
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Hi, if that's the case then my onboard sound card, an AD1988B that definantly supports EAX, is hardware accelerated...
ChrisC
 
Its an MSI limited edition 680i board I believe, however Im not sure what model of X-FI (aka whether it'll be the basic one with no hardware accelleration, or one with) will be used to implement this. Also, being a limited edition board, I think they specifically stated there was only going to be a limited run of these boards :(
 
I have the Realtec ALC888DD on my Gigabyte GA-965-DQ6 and it sounds very good, especially going through the surround amp.
It has Dolby Digital & DTS Encoding/Decoding and supports EAX 2.0, although according to some people Realtec haven't got EAX support configured properly. Seems to sound fine in games to be honest.
I used to have an Audigy 2, but got the bloody awfull crackling noise, which drove me mad.

To my limited hearing, the Realtec sounds as good, if not better than the Audigy in most things.
 
i've got the realtek alc882m onboard with my p5w dh deluxe. ill be honest, it's far better than i thought it would be. i sold my hda x-mystique for that reason. I've tried, REALLY hard to find a valid reason to buy an x-fi but i just cant. the realtek does me fine. the fact that i can have two separate stereo outputs with the onboard is a nice touch
 
james.miller said:
i've got the realtek alc882m onboard with my p5w dh deluxe. ill be honest, it's far better than i thought it would be. i sold my hda x-mystique for that reason. I've tried, REALLY hard to find a valid reason to buy an x-fi but i just cant. the realtek does me fine. the fact that i can have two separate stereo outputs with the onboard is a nice touch
Click to expand...

Xfi's are so cheap now.

Its no biggy getting one IMO.

Onboard sound sucks.
 
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