Hi
I'll soon be buying a new gaming desktop - the first one in 6 years as I haven't been playing much (only some old games like Rome: Total War when I felt the urge).
In my old PC, I have a ancient SB Live! 5.1 from 2001 and I almost exclusively use some mid-range Sennheiser headphones when gaming (IIRC it's a pair of HD470s).
I'm planning not to get a discrete sound card for my new build as many people state that onboard audio has gotten quite good and because it looks like most games are abandoning hardware acceleration for sound.
I'm therefore asking for advice with regards to which motherboard I should buy.
The MB must be a LGA1156 mATX board of solid quality and have good onboard audio while, but apart from that I'm open to suggestions. I'm not terribly interested in overclocking, but I imagine that most good quality MBs also excel in this discipline. RAID is also not important to me.
Some "bonus info":
I'm getting a Core i7 860, some OCZ 1333 (CAS7) or 1600 MHz (CAS7) DDR3 memory (depending on the differenc in price), a AMD 5850 or 5870 based graphics card and a Intel SSD - a X25-M G2 80 GB.
With regards to audio quality, I can say that I'm not a real audiophile (no monster cables
) and I won't be using the computer for music or movies (I have an excellent stereo for that), but on the other hand I don't want to listen to crackling or a sky high noise floor like what I've previously heard from onboard sound.
Thanks in advance
I'll soon be buying a new gaming desktop - the first one in 6 years as I haven't been playing much (only some old games like Rome: Total War when I felt the urge).
In my old PC, I have a ancient SB Live! 5.1 from 2001 and I almost exclusively use some mid-range Sennheiser headphones when gaming (IIRC it's a pair of HD470s).
I'm planning not to get a discrete sound card for my new build as many people state that onboard audio has gotten quite good and because it looks like most games are abandoning hardware acceleration for sound.
I'm therefore asking for advice with regards to which motherboard I should buy.
The MB must be a LGA1156 mATX board of solid quality and have good onboard audio while, but apart from that I'm open to suggestions. I'm not terribly interested in overclocking, but I imagine that most good quality MBs also excel in this discipline. RAID is also not important to me.
Some "bonus info":
I'm getting a Core i7 860, some OCZ 1333 (CAS7) or 1600 MHz (CAS7) DDR3 memory (depending on the differenc in price), a AMD 5850 or 5870 based graphics card and a Intel SSD - a X25-M G2 80 GB.
With regards to audio quality, I can say that I'm not a real audiophile (no monster cables
) and I won't be using the computer for music or movies (I have an excellent stereo for that), but on the other hand I don't want to listen to crackling or a sky high noise floor like what I've previously heard from onboard sound.Thanks in advance
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