Onboard Sounds vs a card?

[Ace Modder]

Hey

I am just wondering if its worth me gettign a soundcard.

MY quality of sound from my onboard is fine,

I'm using a set of creative speakers SBS 380's, only cheapy ones. aprox £25

Well what I'm wondering, is what kind of CPU reduced usage using a dedicated soundcard give me.

At the mo, playing an MP3 gives me around 7-11% CPU usage.

Would that drop ?

 

[Sgt_Pepper]

If you ar using XP then i'd definately recomend getting and XF-i especially if you play games, heard there's problems with vista and sound cards so i couldn't say about that.

 

[musx64]

X-FI Drivers have been much approved in vista x64, no pop or crackling no more, I still find onboard sound a bit tinny.

 

[RaV]

I was going to ask the same thing. whether or not to steal the Audigy(I think its the 1st one) out of the old pc before i sell it. Ill just do it and stop being lazy. I would be interested if there were any figures though.

 

[Ace Modder]

I have Vista 32bit, and I don't find any problems.

Except in wow, the channels defaults back to min each log on!

 

[J.D]

Well my X-fi Xtremem Gamer card even showed my crappy hi fi speakers how to make things sound better. On my Gigaworks S750 it is mind blowing. I play a lot of music as well as play the Keyboard/Piano and the card brings sounds to life over onboard from my experience. I haven't tried the onboard sound on this motherboard but my last board was an Ultra-D from DFI and the sound difference was noticible as I had both the onboard enabled and the X-fi. A quick change between the two and trying the same song showed it easily. Even with the X-fi you do hear instruments and sounds that didn't seem to be there before.

 

[dovey]

Another vote for an external card, not saying the x-fi are the best but thats what i have and it sounds great

 

[akirru]

An external sound card is always better in my opinion

 

[Boah]

While pretty much everyone is going to agree that sound quality will be better on a dedicated sound card (with decent speakers/headphones), the question was really:

what kind of CPU reduced usage using a dedicated soundcard give me.

It depends on a few things, like the sound chip, drivers and operating system. I think the kind of CPU usage you see is symptomatic of a sound chip lacking a digital signal processor so it has to use the CPU for decoding and encoding sound - a dedicated card would take this work and offload the CPU.

The M2N4SLI uses the Realtek ALC850 6-channel AC '97 audio chip, so it sounds (no pun intended) plausible that a sound card will free up the CPU for you.

 

[dovey]

Have to agree with that, i see around 0-2% cpu usage whilst playing music