does the maddog prowler 7.1 soundcards drains my cpu procesing ?

[ppowerman5000]

I was going to get this card, but I was told that it relied on the cpu for procesing the sounds, its that true?Or should I get a soundblaster live instead?

 

[yhelothar]

A soundblaster live will drain your processor a lot too, and will sound much worse. The difference in games between the maddog and the sblive should be neglible in terms of performance.

 

[Brian48]

That's not necessarily true. The SBLive is still a better gaming card overall, and not just because it has an on-board DSP where as the Mad Dog doesn't. EAX 1.0/2.0 still sounds much better with the SBLive than the Mad Dog even though the MD supports these APIs as well. Like all Envy24HT-S cards, it does depend on the host processor for all it's processing. Sure, performance is neglible, but not for ALL games. Some, such as Battlefield 1942, UT2003/2004, etc., the difference is quite noticable even with a full fledge Envy24HT like the Revo.

If you're more into music, the Mad Dog would be the better choice as the VIA Envy24HT-S does a great job as in this area. DVD playback is also excellent. I picked up a few of these during this past Christmas season when they were on sale for $19.95 (after rebates) at CompUSA.

 

[AIWGuru]

The maddog is not VIA vinyl.
It is COMPLETELY host dependant. In Maximum PC's 355 PC questions answered they review this card:
This thing had 4-5x the CPU usage (in full 7.1 mode) of the live and 6-7x that of the audigy 2zs. Even onboard solutions raped this POS. On a 3ghz P4 CPU usage hit 19%.
That's sick.

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: AIWGuru
The maddog is not VIA vinyl.
It is COMPLETELY host dependant. In Maximum PC's 355 PC questions answered they review this card:
This thing had 4-5x the CPU usage (in full 7.1 mode) of the live and 6-7x that of the audigy 2zs. Even onboard solutions raped this POS. On a 3ghz P4 CPU usage hit 19%.
That's sick.

Wow, that's positive.

-Por

 

[ppowerman5000]

thanks guys, I'll get then a soundblaster , be it the live or the audigy!thanks, folks, I'm into gaming so what im looking forward is cpu usage, my procesor is a athlon xp2000 , 512mb ram, and a radeon 9700 nonpro with 128mb ram.thanks. And I forgot to mention in the first post, that the current sound that I have is ac97 onboard audio.thanks for all the help!

 

[AIWGuru]

Originally posted by: ppowerman5000
thanks guys, I'll get then a soundblaster , be it the live or the audigy!thanks, folks, I'm into gaming so what im looking forward is cpu usage, my procesor is a athlon xp2000 , 512mb ram, and a radeon 9700 nonpro with 128mb ram.thanks. And I forgot to mention in the first post, that the current sound that I have is ac97 onboard audio.thanks for all the help!

Yeah, unlike other Via envy solutions this one doesn't even use 24 bit converters so the sound won't even be worth the tradoff of CPU cycles.
Pick yourself up a cheap audigy or audigy 2 refurb.