Does onboard sound slow down ur pc?

[farns]

Yes Im one of the few that use onboard sound ac97 will be fine for my 2.1 speaker setup in my upcoming system but I heard it is a leech on resources and creative onboard sound even more so.
Anyone know any % of how much slower it is,Im comparing ac97 to teh creative 2-channel audio as found on GA-8SRX mobo which I think is teh same as their 6-channel but they disabled 4 channels or somethin..
I dunno Im a noob to tech stuff

Reason being,Id like an ac97 mobo but if its a heinous leech that slows stuff down then no, I will get a soundcard.

 

[Skyclad1uhm1]

Originally posted by: farns
Yes Im one of the few that use onboard sound ac97 will be fine for my 2.1 speaker setup in my upcoming system but I heard it is a leech on resources and creative onboard sound even more so.
Anyone know any % of how much slower it is,Im comparing ac97 to teh creative 2-channel audio as found on GA-8SRX mobo which I think is teh same as their 6-channel but they disabled 4 channels or somethin..
I dunno Im a noob to tech stuff

Reason being,Id like an ac97 mobo but if its a heinous leech that slows stuff down then no, I will get a soundcard.

The drawback however is that the traditional onboard sound used CPU cycles and therefore, slows down the system entirely, but that won't really matter when these systems are built for office work only. I still suggest you disabling them and using a PCI sound card.

 

[farns]

Thanks for that
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1567&p=19
says its about a 10% performance hit during games with onboard enabled so yeh it sux I knwo for sure now lol

 

[Illuware]

I knew this to be true for the AC97. My upcoming motherboard, the Asus A7V333 has a C-Media 6 channel onboard sound. Anyone know if the same rules apply for this?

 

[Necrolezbeast]

I never saw any FPS decrease when I was using my ac97 onboard w/1.2ghz Athlon 256mb pc2100...compared to my soundblaster live 5.1 value

 

[AndyHui]

Originally posted by: Illuware
I knew this to be true for the AC97. My upcoming motherboard, the Asus A7V333 has a C-Media 6 channel onboard sound. Anyone know if the same rules apply for this?

The C-Media 8738 is a hardware sound chip, like an SBLive or a GTXP, but simply with the chip placed on the motherboard.

The CPU usage for the CMI-8738 is comparable to any hardware soundcard, with good performance and sound quality.

 

[farns]

That must mean that separate soundcards give u a 10-15% performance drop as well then in games cos
the CMedia CMI8738 6-channel in that link I posted was worst offender in that graph.
If theres no difference in cpu usuage I see no reason to get a soundcard at all, unless you are hardcore and want the superior sound quality of the audigy or extigy or whatever.
Anyone seen any cpu-usage graphs for soundblaster cards?
According to that graph which is on a 2ghz cpu u will lose at least 200mhz with sound enabled!!!!!

 

[Don Vito Corleone]

Originally posted by: farns
That must mean that separate soundcards give u a 10-15% performance drop as well then in games cos
the CMedia CMI8738 6-channel in that link I posted was worst offender in that graph.
If theres no difference in cpu usuage I see no reason to get a soundcard at all, unless you are hardcore and want the superior sound quality of the audigy or extigy or whatever.
Anyone seen any cpu-usage graphs for soundblaster cards?
According to that graph which is on a 2ghz cpu u will lose at least 200mhz with sound enabled!!!!!

I was curious about this as well (I have an older SB Live! X-Gamer and just ordered an Asus P4S533, equipped with the CMedia CM1738), and so I looked up some data on CPU utilization with the SB Live! According to this fairly recent test by Tom, a Live! or Audigy only uses 2-3% of CPU power. This test also shows CPU utilization of significantly less than 10-15% for an Audigy. I guess these tests are a bit unscientific, but I think I will be installing my Live! anyway.

 

[Skyclad1uhm1]

Originally posted by: Necrolezbeast
I never saw any FPS decrease when I was using my ac97 onboard w/1.2ghz Athlon 256mb pc2100...compared to my soundblaster live 5.1 value

FPS is limited by your videocard more than your CPU usually.

 

[Peter]

Folks please remember that this is not so much about onboard or not, AC97 or not. It's not about where the sound engine is and what kind of digital bus it uses to connect the codec (AC97 is just a bus!).

It's about how much brain the sound engine itself has. There are intelligent chipset integrated sound engines (ALi chipsets, some SiS), not-so-bright ones like those in the VIA chipsets, and there are completely stupid CPU driven ones (Intel and some other SiS); and of course all these three levels also appear on separate PCI audio chips, be they onboard or on a card. E.g. SB Audigy is a very intelligent one (and uses AC97 codecs btw), SB!Live and C-Media 8738 are quite OK but do use a noticeable amount of CPU, and things like the ALS4000 or SB!128/CT5880 chips are rather brainless.

regards, Peter

 

[AndyHui]

SB!128/CT5880 chips are rather brainless

Hehehe...that's a good way of putting it.

 

[Zap]

Peter's post was pretty informative (learn something every day, heh). There does seem to be a lot of mis-information regarding onboard sound. Here are some facts (anyone correct me if I'm wrong):

- Creative Labs has made motherboards that have onboard SoundBlaster Live. Does being onboard suddenly make the Live a bad card? No.

- The "percent drop" using onboard sound that was in the AT article listed by farns was onboard sound versus NO SOUND AT ALL, not versus any add-in card.

- (THIS IS JUST MY GUESS, could be wrong) Again with the AT article, the "hardware" sound using the CMedia chip (and Creative chip) used more CPU cycles than the cheaper offerings. Perhaps the extra CPU cycles are eaten up through processing 4 extra channels or other stuff.

- People complain about low sound quality of onboard audio... using onboard audio that wasn't obviously faulty, I'd like to see anyone hear a quality difference between it and an add-on card like the Audigy, using headphones or a stereo pair of speakers, no sound processing and playing a digitized source (not synthesized). Double-blind test, guys. I don't think anyone would hear a difference.