Gigabyte 7VRXP onboard sound vs. SB Live

[combichem]

I'm upgrading to a GA-7VRXP mainboard. I've heard that it has pretty decent onboard sound. I currently have a SB Live from my old system. Is the onboard sound comparable to the SB card.. Is it better or worse? What is your opinion on which sound option I should choose?

 

[Boonesmi]

the 7vrxp actually has a creative sound chip onboard

if you only use sound for listening to mp3's and playing some games, etc then the onboard will work great for you (no saying its better then the sblive, just that its very comparable)

but it really depends on what version of the sblive you have.

 

[WaTaGuMp]

Onboard sound uses CPU speed to run it, so I prefer to go with a seperate sound card. SOME onboard sound will use as much as 100mhz of CPU speed. The card you have is a great card I say use it.

 

[mschell]

Not all "onboard" sound devices use more CPU cycles then a card pluged into a PCI slot. The Creative chip on the Gigabyte board is the same chip in the Creative Sound Blaster 128 which is an upgraded version of the origional Ensoniq Audio PCI sound chip which was the first PCI based soundcard by the way. The chip itself does most of the signal processing freeing the CPU for other things.
It makes no difference to the motherboard if a device is soldered to the board or connected through the PCI slot. This goes for soundchips, RAID controllers and anything else that can be put on a PCI card.

You might be thinking of AC97 sound which also has a chip soldered to the motherboard, the difference is this chip does no signal processing but acts as an interconnect to the sound inputs and outputs, all sound processing is done by the software (drivers) which takes CPU cycles.