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Old after-market sound card vs current on-board audio

H

hellfreeze

Golden Member
In light of a new rig i'm building, and the klipsch speakers i ordered, i've begun to wonder something...

at home i have an old soundblaster live! audio card...and now i'm ordering the abit IC7-G mobo with built-in audio...but which is better? has modern on-board audio caught up with the older sound cards?

i'm really curious about this...
 
I'm interested in this also, I have a dual opteron with onboard sound and would like to know if using my Live! is worth it or if I should grab an Audigy 2
 
lol. so has on-board audio caught up with old cards like the sound blaster live?
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Can't really say. I have a SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 in my wife's machine (P4 3.4C in Asus P4C800-E Deluxe). That computer is hooked up to some ancient Altec Lansing speakers, but even so, the Live card sounds better than the onboard audio (AD1985 AC 97').

My new system (see my sig below) has a SB Audugy2 ZS. I tried the onboard (Realtek AC97') sound but it sounded like crap so I disabled in in favor of the Audigy2 ZS. Also, there was a lot of noise and some popping with the onboard sound. Maybe it was immature drivers, I don't know. But even without the noise and popping it still would sound weak in comparison to an even an OEM Audigy2. OEM Audigy2s' use cheaper mini-RCA connectors, whereas the Audigy2 ZS and up uses gold-plated connectors - not that the gold-plated connectors provide a tangible difference in sound quality.

Its' really not fair to compare onboard sound solutions to dedicated sound cards like the Audigy2. The dedicated cards have their own processing chips and are thus much more powerful and rich sounding. I am going to upgrade my wife's soundcard and speakers, migrating them over to my daughter's PC, as that PC does not have a sound card or speakers currently. What goes in my wife's PC? An Audigy2 ZS.

I'm interested in this also, I have a dual opteron with onboard sound and would like to know if using my Live! is worth it or if I should grab an Audigy 2
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I would go for the Audigy2 ZS. I ran both my old SB Live 5.1 and my Audigy2 ZS in my current system for comparision, and the Audigy2 sounds better.


my bro said the same, tho he said the audigy probably hasn't been matched yet by on-board audio
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Definitely not. Current onboard sound solutions pale in comparison to current (i.e. Audigy2-series, ect) dedicated sound as I mentioned above in my post.
 
It all depends on what chipset you are using on the onboard sound. Some onboard sound is just as good as an original Live! card. some isn't. But with the speakers you have, a seperate card would sound leaps and bounds better.
 
I can't say I noticed much difference in quality, but when I put my SBLive! back into my comp a while ago, replacing the nForce2's MCP audio, it took quite a load off the CPU during games.
 
SB-live is long in the tooth, but the advantages are:
(1)Lower CPU utilization
(2)Incase you overclock your CPU and if your PCI bus hovers around the 36-37Mhz mark then the onboard won't work wheras the SB live! will still work! My good old pentium-II was overclocked with the PCI bus running at 39 Mhz. THE SB live! worked perfectly, except that I had to switch my hard drive to a PIO mode.......................
(3)SB Live! is better when you take all these things into consideration.

____________________________________________________________
AMD athlon XP 2000+ @ 2287.5Mhz 183*12.5
a7-n8x delux with Uber BIOS
120GB*2 Seagate barracuda on RAID.
Asus V9520 Magic
1.5 gig PC-3200 Corsair.
 
Aries64: thanks for the informative reply
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You're welcome. Also, Zelmo3 pointed out that you will have lower CPU utilization using a dedicated sound card. This is a very good point, and one that I forgot to mention. If you play FPS (first person shooter)s' a dedicated sound card can help a lot. The sound processor(s) on the sound card does the majority of the workload, hence less attention is needed from the CPU. The fewer CPU cycles eaten-up by hardware resources the better your game performance will be.

Also, if you have even comtemplated upgrading to a SB Audigy2 you can typically find the Audigy2 ZS (Gamer) card for about $90.00 on the net'. If you live in a state where there are Fry's Electronics stores (I live in Southern California), Fry's is selling the Audigy2 ZS for $129.99 (in-store) minus a $50.00 mail-in rebate (final price $79.99 exclusive of tax). Not bad. Don't forget to send in the rebate though!. Fry's price on their Outpost.com site for the same card is $99.99.

Check your local paper - Fry's runs a big 4-page ad every Friday. I've been to stores in Texas and California and the "sale" items seem to be consistent. I saw the ad in yesterday's (8/8) LA Times.

Heres a link to PriceGrabber for your internet shopping!

http://www.pricegrabber.com/se...185001&mode=gotocp


 
hehe. thanks aries64. i was just at fry's yesterday but didn't think to check out the sound cards. oh well. heh. i'll check next time 🙂. thanks again for all your help
 
Originally posted by: Zelmo3
I can't say I noticed much difference in quality, but when I put my SBLive! back into my comp a while ago, replacing the nForce2's MCP audio, it took quite a load off the CPU during games.
Click to expand...
Sounds like something was borked, you probably stuck with the nV audio drivers instead of trying the realtek eh? Here's a implementation of the realtek ALC650 performing better than the original Audigy for gaming fps

Text

Now here's the Audigy and Live together text

Doesn't look like you should have noticed a damned thing performance wise if something wasn't borked.
 
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