I have found the Realtek AC97 850 CODEC to be quite adequate. Go to
www.realtek.com.tw to get the latest drivers! Load the nVidia 6.53 drivers first, untick the AUDIO option, and then load the ones from the realtek site. Should work quite well. If you are a major audiophile, then there are two really good sound cards out there besides not-so-Creative-crap: the first is the Chaintech AV-710, which when set to use the Wolfson DAC for 2.1 sound will blow away most home stereos in sound quality, especially when paired with awesome speakers (I am using a Klipsch 2.1 setup). It is VIA Envy24 HT-S based, and is quite good, but does nothing for hardware acceleration (nor would your on-board CODEC). It is best when set for the high-sample rate 2.1 mode using the Wolfson DAC or using it for digital out. If you try analog 5.1 or 7.1 sound on it, then you also bring the lesser VIA CODEC present on the card into play--the VIA CODEC controls all the speakers but the rear ones. The Wolfson DAC controls the rear speakers (black jack) but can be set as I said for a high sample rate 2.1 setup at the expense of surround. It costs a paltry $25 on NewEgg, and be sure to download the latest drivers from
www.viaarena.com -- do not use the ones on the CD. The other and more expensive option is the new Bluegears 7.1 C-Media based card ($99), which happens to also hardware accelerate sound streams and has built-in Dolby Digital Live! encoding, not to mention just as good or better sound than the Envy24 series. Both sound cards have optical and coax digital -out if you intend to send sound to an external decoder. I hope this helps you out. Any of the options I mentioned are all well-behaved and will work great. The best piece of advice I can give you is to avoid anything not-so-Creative if you get my drift.
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