AC97 soound and the south bridge , what the connection

[Vette73]

OK. I thought the AC97 sound onboard motherboards connected to the southbridge by way of the PCI bus. BUT I was looking at some specs of a board, asus with ADI sound, and noticed that it had the AC97 sound skipping the PCI bus and connecting directly to the southbridge?

So does using the AC97 sound eat into the PCI bandwidth? Or does it have its own ride? Also does it matter if you use the Digital out vs the standard output?

Thanks

 

[Vette73]

I know someone knows?

 

[Vette73]

night bump

 

[Operandi]

The physical connection between the AC97 codec and the south bridge won?t use any resources, but using the integrated audio will. All modern chipsets use something much faster then the PCI bus for communicating with north to south bridge so I wouldn?t worry about the resources. The difference between using the digital vs analog outputs is with the digital you are by passing the on board AC97 DAC so you'll prolly get better sound depending on what ends up doing the decoding, (that?s only for movies in most cases).