Sound card for a HTPC which one cheap!

SBD · 12 Jun 2008 at 15:42

Hi all

I'm in need of a sound card old or new for my HTPC which is most of my old rig Athlon 64 939 time.

Since I have an AV receiver would I be right in thinking that if it is connected via an optical cable then the sound card can be budget since all the decoding is done by the amp?

What card would you suggest the only specification I have is 5.1 or higher and an optical output.

SBD · 14 Jun 2008 at 15:35

anyone?

dave-lew99 · 14 Jun 2008 at 16:42

Yes - sort of.

The quality will be limited to how good the clock is on the soundcard, however unless you plan to spend quite a bit - so that soundcard and amp will both lock to the same clock you won't see a difference.

In short, anything which has optical (or coaxial if you amp will take it) output will be fine - on-board if you have it - my old mediacentre used a 24bit SB Live card, new one uses on-board with digital output and theres no difference.

Uriel · 14 Jun 2008 at 17:15

What operating system will you be using and do you plan to game on it at all?

SBD · 14 Jun 2008 at 19:22

Well I'm not too sure on the OS. I have a copy of Vista ultimate 64bit and I have XP pro 32bit. I'm thinking about going XP because the HTPC only has 1Gb of ram and unzip/raring seems to be much faster on XP which is strange lol.

The HTPC spec is

3500+
1Gb DDR
gigabyte GA-K8N51GMF-9 (which doesn't have any digital output

)
Corsair VX 450W
SATA DVD RW amd SATA Hard drive
Li lian V350b or SilverStone GD02B not sure which one yet.
ATi X850XT(i know this is a bit random but I have it spair might aswell use it for abit of half life 2

)

The above should run Vista ok not really going to game on it much I have my main pc for that

. Since Vista can start up in media mode it seems the better choice unless a linux/ free media OS is out there which does the job better and looks the part

dave-lew99 · 14 Jun 2008 at 19:43

XP MCE can start mediacentre automatically but really XP MCE is so buggy it's not worth using, they really improved it with vista.

As for linux media OS's - LinuxMCE or MythBuntu to name a couple, although i have never found user interfaces across all of linux to be quite as polished as windows - using Vista MCE on my HTPC is actually a pleasure, it just *works*

SBD · 16 Jun 2008 at 13:17

Does anyone know which soundcard this is

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=SC-000-OK

Becasue OCUK says it works in XP/2000 but nothing about vista. I'm going to be using vista MC so i need it to work with vista

dave-lew99 · 16 Jun 2008 at 17:39

It's C-Media based, chances are it will just *work*, but drop an email to customer support and ask to be sure.

spartan225 · 17 Jun 2008 at 17:26

i believe this http://www.sweex.com/communicatie.php?subsectie=4&item=27&artikel=751&detail=d is the card, "Enjoy 7.1 surround sound during games, films and music with this Sweex Sound Card", they have vista drivers for it

errata · 19 Jun 2008 at 14:06

second user soundblaster/audigy would at elast have the benefit of being a known quantity re quality, s/n etc

ubern00b · 19 Jun 2008 at 15:13

Any recommendations for a Low Profile sound card? Just need optical out, pci or pcie x1 and cheap

Edit: By Low Profile I mean card hight as well as bracket.