AC 97 questions...

[chuckwagon]

Alot of motherboards are coming out w/ this on board audio. I was just wondering if it is any good. I'm about to buy a ECS K7S5A and it comes with the onboard audio. So i have a couple of questions. Does it sound good compared to a real PCI sound card? Can you use a real sound card on the board if i dont' want to use the AC 97? Can you hook up a 4 speaker set up to it? Thanks in advance.

Charles

 

[Darksamie]

The AC97 sound card sounds pretty good. Although I would rather get an SB Live! or something along those lines....

It should do unless you are a serious audiophile.

You can disable the onboard ausio in the BIOS if you want to put a sound card in.

You can't hook up the 4 speaker system to it and have stereo on it. You can however, if you play around with the wiring, but you won't get front/rear sound.

 

[Dunbar]

It's quite good in my experience, I've directly compared it (A/B) to an external CD player and could detect only minor differences. I've heard MP3's are bad on it but that has not been my experience. If you're listening through computer speakers I would not pay extra for a sound card, you can always add that later anyways.

 

[TastyCakes]

In comparison to a PCI sound card, it really doesn't compete. The AC97 is ok for casual internet usage or something, but if you're a gamer, you'll be better off with a PCI card. I have the AC97 on my K7VZA by ECS...used it for a week before I got tired of some of the poor quality I got in games performance and even in some cases compatibility-wise. A Maxi MUSE PCI card is a decent $20 solution and I'd recommend it over the onboard audio. If ya do get something different, the onboard sound *can* be disabled in the BIOS. (or Windows if ya don't like getting into that sorta thing) Hope this helps.

 

[chuckwagon]

I would also like to know which would sound better, AC 97 or my current sound card, a PCI soundblaster 128. My current soundblaster sounds fine...so it if ac 97 sounds as good or better than my sound card, i'm not gonna shell out the 50 dollars or so for a Live! 5.1. Thanks.

Charles

 

[kylef]

The board that you are mentioning has the Sis 735 chipset. The sound codec on that board gets its own dedicated channel to the memory controller and CPU (called the Sis "multithreaded I/O channel&quot, so it should not have the same problems of stuttering that Via chipset users experience during periods of system activity with their AC97 codec based sound.

As far as the sound quality of the analog portion of the sound on that particular board, I have NO IDEA.

 

[kylef]

Boy, that's really annoying. Ever since Anandtech upgraded to the new Fusetalk software, whenever I have a double quoted expression inside parentheses, the close parenthesis results in a smiley face! Why is that? It's very annoying! I think it must be a bug...