Do I need a sound card?

[Drakino]

I recently bought a set of Logitech Z5300 5.1 speakers to enjoy Doom 3 a bit more. Right now the onboard sound "AC97 2.2 6 Channel sound" on my Shuttle SB51G is driving them, and seems to do fine to give me surround sound in Doom 3 and a few other games.

So, what would buying a sound card like the Creative Audigy 2 ZS get me, beyond 200 megs of crap utilities and loss of my front sound ports? Anything noticible in the sound experience, or is EAX just marketing hype still? Last time I really paid attention to this was when I got my old Turtle Beach Montego II Quadzilla, and it did A3D, regarded at the time as better then EAX. Creative now has ensured they have crushed any competiting technology, resulting in only them for a true gamer sound card it seems. My only other solutiion would seem to be NVidia's Soundstorm, but thats an integrated solution that I hope to have with my next Shuttle mid next year.

Oddly enough, UT2K4 lets me set HW 3D + EAX just fine with my existing onboard solution. So I'm really at a loss at what a PCI card would add.

 

[Algere]

EAX is a plus

It was definitely noticeable with my former $20 pair of Sony headphones, e.g. in Halo the sound of banging my gun against a rock was more realistic than compared to the onboard (SoundMax) solution I was using before. Aside from that there's also better sound quality, lower CPU utilization, and what not.

 

[zodder]

You'll get a firewire port?

 

[Kaido]

For the cost of an audigy2 zs, you might as well get a nice asus athlon xp motherboard with soundstorm on it, lol. Santa brought me my audigy, so I can't complain

 

[Sideswipe001]

Originally posted by: Kaido
For the cost of an audigy2 zs, you might as well get a nice asus athlon xp motherboard with soundstorm on it, lol. Santa brought me my audigy, so I can't complain

He's using a Shuttle system - I assume that means SFF, and no motherboard upgrade possibilities.

Personally, I could tell a huge difference between any onboard sound and my Audigy 2 ZS. I love it. But I certainly agree the drivers are bloated. Games sound much better with EAX.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: Sideswipe001

Originally posted by: Kaido
For the cost of an audigy2 zs, you might as well get a nice asus athlon xp motherboard with soundstorm on it, lol. Santa brought me my audigy, so I can't complain

He's using a Shuttle system - I assume that means SFF, and no motherboard upgrade possibilities.

Personally, I could tell a huge difference between any onboard sound and my Audigy 2 ZS. I love it. But I certainly agree the drivers are bloated. Games sound much better with EAX.

d'oh, didn't realize it was SFF. I love my Audigy2...I upgraded mainly because I was using Senn HD 570 headphones and the onboard audio was giving me a headache. The Audigy2 fixed that, plus has lots of neat features like a DVD-Audio player.

 

[Drakino]

The thing is, EAX seems to be a part of my onboard sound based on the fact that UT lets me enable it...

Firewire is no real bonus, as it will simply add a 4th port to my system.

I suppose the CPU usage might be worthwhile. Anyone know any benchmarks, specificially with Doom 3 surround sound on an onboard solution compaired to the Audigy?

 

[tk149]

Hopefully, someone better informed can expand on this, but I heard that there are different versions of EAX. Creative released the older EAX standard to the public domain (so other manufacturers can use it), but have kept the newest ones proprietary (so only Creative can use it).

Maybe UT uses an older EAX but Doom 3 uses a new EAX?

 

[DarkKnight]

I'm kinda in the same situation as you, I have an nforce2 chipset and I'm not sure if getting an Audigy2 ZS is worth $80. Audigy 2 has EAX HD 3.0 and 4.0, while ours only has 2.0. I talked to my friend who has an audigy 2 and he says that music sounds a lot better, esp. the bass, and that the newer EAX games sound awesome. But I'm not sure if I wanna pull the trigger b/c I'm not a big audiophile and sofar the onboard has been alright.

The only reason I'm even thinking about it is because of the doom 3 problems with nf2apu(might be fixed by patch or driver update) and the fact that I got a 5.1 surround system. Is 5.1 on audigy a lot better than on the nforce?

 

[Cerb]

2. If you have to ask, probably not.
2. You won't need anything but the driver--you just have to get all that crap for like a 10MB part.
3. There is more than one version of EAX, and what's going on is the CPU is doing a lot more work than if you had a soundcard that could do it in hardware (Audigy 2).

 

[Wingznut]

Doom 3 uses proprietary audio programming that is driven 100% by the cpu. So, for Doom 3, there is no point in getting a sound card.

As for other games, an Audigy is an excellent upgrade.

 

[Drakino]

Well, I did buy the Audigy 2 ZS today. While I despise Creatve, it gives me a few advantages:

Lower CPU usage by the audio system for most games.

A Line in jack in addition to the 3 going to the 5.1 speakers. The SB51 has 3 audio outs on the back that get tied up by 5.1. I do use the Line in quite a bit with an externam MP3 player.


So, it's not all that bad. It's just a shame there really is no competition to Creative anymore. I still have my first non Soundblaster card, a Turtle Beach Tropez Plus, a full length ISA card that beat out the AWE32 in many ways.

 

[Arcanedeath]

Personaly at this point unless your a heavy gammer and really need EAX 3.0 and 4.0, I'd stay away from creative, their drivers and apps are so bloated it crazy your onboard 6 channel audio is prob. fine and you get your front pannel audio jacks which prolly wouldn't be the case w/ the Audigy 2 or 2 ZS. The last creative card that I truely liked was the AWE64 / AWE64 gold, if my motherboard had an ISA slot I'd still be using that card, it sounded that good , but in any event w/ a SFF system I'm sure you can find a better use for a PCI slot than a creative product

 

[caz67]

I personally love my Audigy 2ZS Platinum Pro. It makes all my games and music absolutely rock. My Z680's love it..LOL

 

[Cerb]

No competition? Wake up and smell the VIA!
$24 for a good non-gaming card, $100 for a very good one (Chaintech AV-710).
Allegedly, VIA is working on a gaming version of the Envy. Right now its biggest downside is sky-high CPU use for gaming.

 

[jwix]

Drakino, I have a shuttle SN41G2 (Nforce 2 sound) which I used for gaming and home theatre for about year before buying an Audigy 2 ZS. Nforce sound did support up to EAX 2 standard, and did a fine job of it for the most part. However, there were bugs in some games, and background hiss during quiet scenes of DVD movies. There was also a bug with the dolby 5.1 soundpack on PowerDVD - very annoying! Once I plugged in the Audigy, the bugs disappeared and the quality of DVD sound noticeably improved with very little background noise. Bottom line - Creative is well supported.
I have one game that uses EAX 4.0 and that is Colin McCrae Rally. It sounds excellent and runs at top frame rates if that helps (Subjective). As for CPU overhead, who knows. Perhaps Anandtech should put together a doom 3 benchmark that compares sound hardware. I hardly ever see objective analysis of sound hardware these days.
One last thing - it's true the software install is ridiculous but 2 items have brought me joy. First, is the ability to capture MP3 streams from the internet. The second is a utitiity that balance the surround sound speakers in my room, then saves it as a profile. The latter has been handy as it's difficult to achieve perfect symetry with speaker placement. Hope this helps!

 

[jwix]

Doom 3 will get EAX support. This is definately a marketing coup for Creative. Anandtech, please do a before/after EAX benchmark comparison. A little subject analysis on the sound effect quality wouldn't hurt either.

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040726/sfm055_1.html

 

[DarkKnight]

Originally posted by: Drakino
Well, I did buy the Audigy 2 ZS today. While I despise Creatve, it gives me a few advantages:

Lower CPU usage by the audio system for most games.

A Line in jack in addition to the 3 going to the 5.1 speakers. The SB51 has 3 audio outs on the back that get tied up by 5.1. I do use the Line in quite a bit with an externam MP3 player.


So, it's not all that bad. It's just a shame there really is no competition to Creative anymore. I still have my first non Soundblaster card, a Turtle Beach Tropez Plus, a full length ISA card that beat out the AWE32 in many ways.

did the card noticeably improve 5.1 sound in games?

 

[Jeff7181]

Don't waste your money on an Audigy 2. The sound quality isn't much different... it does support new EAX versions, but that's not a big deal. nVidia's onboard sound actually uses less CPU power than an Audigy or Audig 2. The only reason I'd recommend replacing your onboard nVidia sound with an Audigy 2 ZS is if you need 7.1 surround support, DVD-Audio support, or do a lot of recording and need the features of the Audigy 2 ZS Platinum.

 

[Drakino]

Originally posted by: Cerb
No competition? Wake up and smell the VIA!
$24 for a good non-gaming card, $100 for a very good one (Chaintech AV-710).
Allegedly, VIA is working on a gaming version of the Envy. Right now its biggest downside is sky-high CPU use for gaming.

I do wish them luck, but as you said their products aren't gamer friendly right now with no processor onboard to do 3d. I did look at the newest Turtle Beach cards first, and they use the current Via solution. Tempting, if my HTPC ever needs an upgrade from the Santa Cruz it is running now.

As to the others, yes, I did notice a difference with the Audigy. Nothing much in games that I can really tell, but the speaker calibration that I went through helped to center the sounds more on me. Utility wise, none got installed beyond the volume control applicatio and the speaker calibration.

*waits impatiently for a Athlon 64 Shuttle with Soundstorm, or a PCIe Soundstorm card*