onboard sound any good?

imamosher · 4 Mar 2010 at 14:38

I have a MSI790GX mobo and it has an optical out, I also have an old soundblaster card in the pc which I run a 3.5mm headphone jack out of and into my home stereo.

Should I be using the optical out of the onboard sound, is it any good?

thanks

anything I don't mind · 4 Mar 2010 at 14:55

i think onboard sound these days is as good as some third party pci sound cards that are available.

when you say optical out do you mean the spdif ? link

spdif is nice if you have a device that can take it, ie a nice amp . i would use it.

but most headphones and speakers come with the standard 3.5mm head phone jack which is just as good, i don't think you would hear much difference between the outputs unless you had expensive speakers/amps.

imamosher · 4 Mar 2010 at 14:56

Yes the spdif is what I was refering to, I think I may try this out this evening and see if there is any difference.

Looking to purchase a nice Onkyo receiver soon, then I should be able to hear the difference nicely.

DTWD · 5 Mar 2010 at 16:59

I have an onboard sound card I use to optically feed the 5.1 speakers next to the TV (for when I swap the output from monitor to TV). It sounds ok but it sounds like the equaliser is doing an inverted bell rather than the flat it's supposed to be. My Audidgy sounds completely different, but has no TOS so that feeds my 5.1 in the computer room via a DIN.