K7S5A Help needed! maybe these are generic ...

[dandruff]

K7S5A Help needed! maybe these are generic questions for MBs with onboard stuff:

I have ECS K7S5a ver 3.x. I have two questions:

a) is it better to use onboard sound or use a sound card (i have a Creative soundblaster 16bit). I believe the onboard sound on this mother board is AC-97 (dont know what that means - dolby? 4 channel?)

b) is it better to use onboard LAN or use a pc lan card (i have SMC EZ 10/100 card)?

will it improves performance in anyway if i just use everything on-board - its a amd 1800xp+ running win2k ... not for gaming or anything?

thanks in advance!

Go CHIEFS!

 

[Peter]

a) AC97 is just the name of the standard interconnect of sound engines and digital/analog converter chip (aka codec). Nothing to do with the capabilities of this combination.

K7S5A came in two versions regarding sound - either with a C-Media 9738 codec for 4-channel sound, or with an ALC100 basic stereo codec. The 4-channel solution is quite good, the stereo one is, well, basic.

Analog output fidelity rises and falls with the quality of your power supply.
PCI sound cards can give you more features, more channels, and better signal/noise ratio. If you spend some money on them, cheap ones like the SB16 aren't any better than what you have already. (And the SB16 sound engine is all software, not improving on system performance either.)

b) The LAN on this board comes from a chipset integrated unit on a fast bus. Anything PCI would be on a slower bus. Throughput will be the same, but total system load is lower with the onboard unit.

 

[mechBgon]

My 2¢ worth: let your ears be the judge on the audio, and use the onboard SiS LAN.

The onboard K7S5A audio is two-channel, last I knew (mine was, anyway), and not particularly great-sounding. If you want upper-end audio performance, pick up an Asus A7N266-VM/AA motherboard, which has nVidia's high-performance audio processors, six-channel output and comes with not only analog-out, but two flavors of digital-out so you can pipe Dolby AC3 straight to your home theater system via coaxial or optical S/PDIF. The board is not new technology by any means, but it's a nice board for $59 and supports everything that your K7S5A does.

 

[Peter]

As I said, K7S5A was available in _both_ 2- and 4-channel-audio versions most of the time. Analog output quality is a matter of power supply quality, mostly. I've heard everything from quite good to unbearably noisy, depending on what quality PSU had been used and how much load is on it.
The 4-channel version is quite a bit better in signal/noise ratio, anyway.

Neither of the two is any worse than the PCI SoundBlaster 16.

 

[dandruff]

Thank you guys ... going with onboard tuff ....