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Good 754/AGP mobo with decent onboard sound?

G

gbryant

Member
I decided to do a mild upgrade and take my 2600 barton to a 64 3700, but since I'm keeping my AGP video card (X800xt) I decided to go the cheaper route of socket 754 (I'll upgrade to PCIE and 939 later). Looking at reviews, no one seems to mention the quality of onboard audio though. Right now I have an Nforce2 which has great onboard audio but I've heard the more recent Nforce boards are actually worse. After dealing with a nightmare of compatibility issues and driver conflicts with an SB Live (bah on Creative) I don't really have much enthuisasm for another sound card either. Anyone know if any of these boards have exceptional audio?
 
By audio, I'm guessing analog out? In that case, all of them are pretty much equal since Soundstorm was cut out of the NF3/NF4 🙁 I've used both an ABIT KV8 Pro (VIA K8T800 Pro) and an ASUS K8N-E (nF3 250GB) and I like both equally.
 
Soundstorm is a qualification program, not a feature. Also, the cutback to the cheaper sound engine in later NForce chipsets isn't about audio quality, it's about CPU load if anything. Analog audio quality is about quality and care in board engineering - noise decoupling, power supply stability, trace routing, etc.

I found the audio on my ECS 755-A2 to be adequately noisefree, about as good as it gets for an onboard solution. It's a six-channel solution (drawback: Rear and c/b jacks are shared with mic and line-in). Digital output also available (bracket purchased separately).
 
Originally posted by: Peter
Digital output also available (bracket purchased separately).
Click to expand...

Should be pretty easy to make coaxial digital outputs.

One option for the OP would be the socket 939 ASRock 939SATA2 board, with both PCIe and AGP.
 
Yes ... but this particular mainboard has often been found to have totally awful noise issues on the onboard sound.

If it's going to be PCI-Express with socket-939, then I'd recommend the ECS NForce4-A939. No nonsense, and digital-audio jack straight on the mainboard (at least where I'm buying them). Its socket-754 sibling -A754 has it on an internal header.
 
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