Karajan Onboard sound VS. 4yr old Audigy PCI

[vtohthree]

Ok, here's the situation for this... I have a DFI nf4 lanparty ultra-D, and it came with the built in Karajan sound device, unfortunately I wasn't able to put it in my case because a fan was in the way of it, so I used a donor, my 4 year old Creative Labs Audigy Gamer sound card(5.1) to put in the PCI slot. All this is about to change now since I'm going to migrate everything into an Antec p180...now I have to decide which one to keep.

This may be a dumb question, but which should I use? Obviously a stand alone card should be better...but after 4 years worth of technology, I'm sure there have been many advancements for onboard sound devices, so for all I know the Karajan owns the Audigy.

Any one know by facts, figures, and/or experience?

 

[GoodRevrnd]

i have the same board, and the same case
i got my karajan to fit (i also have the original audigy vanilla ironically)
if you take the fan out, install mobo, you can put the fan back in and everything fits fine; they just barely touch (assuming you're using stock fan anyway)
i couldn't tell you which one sounds better though


edit: misread, thot u have the p180 currently
keep in mind you will need to take the back fan out first though

 

[BOLt]

Keep the discrete sound card, IMO. Onboard sound not only taxes the CPU much more (is the CPU even taxed at all by a discrete sound solution?), but it's going to be less quality simply based on EAX support, more possible voices for games, higher frequency, superior audio codec, etc. for the Audigy.

By the way, for my more recent build I chose to buy a Creative Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit instead of the Audigy 2 ZS even though I could afford the latter because Creative really hadn't done very much in the way of improving their Sound Blaster hardware between the Live! series and the Audigy 2, contrary to popular belief. They use much of the same technology with the major difference being more inputs and EAX 3.0 support on the Audigy 2 (the Live! only has EAX 2.0). These few differences hardly warrant the $40 premium on the Audigy 2 vs. the SB Live! 24-bit.

What I'm trying to say is newer is not necessarily better. I'm sure you've already figured that out, but it's good to be reminded (I know that I sometimes trick myself into thinking that newer is always better, but usually something or someone is able to bring me back down to Earth.) Anyway, I'm sure you'll be fine either way.

Cheers!

 

[mwmorph]

Originally posted by: BOLt
Keep the discrete sound card, IMO. Onboard sound not only taxes the CPU much more (is the CPU even taxed at all by a discrete sound solution?), but it's going to be less quality simply based on EAX support, more possible voices for games, higher frequency, superior audio codec, etc. for the Audigy.

By the way, for my more recent build I chose to buy a Creative Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit instead of the Audigy 2 ZS even though I could afford the latter because Creative really hadn't done very much in the way of improving their Sound Blaster hardware between the Live! series and the Audigy 2, contrary to popular belief. They use much of the same technology with the major difference being more inputs and EAX 3.0 support on the Audigy 2 (the Live! only has EAX 2.0). These few differences hardly warrant the $40 premium on the Audigy 2 vs. the SB Live! 24-bit.

What I'm trying to say is newer is not necessarily better. I'm sure you've already figured that out, but it's good to be reminded (I know that I sometimes trick myself into thinking that newer is always better, but usually something or someone is able to bring me back down to Earth.) Anyway, I'm sure you'll be fine either way.

Cheers!

eh, the onboard solution will tax you something like 1-6% cpu depending on 2d or 3d. The live will still tax you around 1-5% depending on 2d or 3d, more if there's eax.(there is still overhead involved).

The karajan is a realtek aLC850 on a riser to reduce motherboard interference and it really dosent matter unless you have some good headphones or speakers, but since you have an sb live anyway just sitting there...

onboard is already pretty good and works very well. the new realteks are really pretty decent. SBlive will be marginally better though.

 

[slash196]

I say stick with your sound card. I don't like onboard sound eating up my cycles, so I sprung for a cheapie sound card, couldn't be happier with it.

 

[vtohthree]

Yeah I certainly put that into consideration as well, the fact that it would tax a small amount from my cpu, but I'm overclocked at 2.76gHz right now(I change it almost every time I reboot), so I didn't think it would make too much of a difference. I guess things lean a little more towards the stand alone sound card over the karajan though.

Thanks for the input!