Old SB Audigy vs Onboard Audio

[Ertaz]

I have this card laying around. I plan on doing some light gaming and I have some basic stereo speakers hooked to it. Would it provide better audio or free system resources if I used it instead of the integrated sound on my Asrock x58 extreme? Or is it just too old to be relevant or worthwhile?

 

[jdjbuffalo]

For 99% of people the onboard sound is as good or better than any discrete sound card. The amount of CPU power to run sound is less than 1%. The only people who get anything out of discrete sound cards are those that high end speakers connected via analog ports and those with headphones that can hear interference that can occur on some setups.

I have a $300 receiver and $300 of speakers/sub hooked up to my onboard sound card via an SPDIF cable. It's great for games, movies and music.

 

[Lazlo Panaflex]

Didn't those old Audigys have driver problems back in the day? I'd say ditch it & go with the onboard sound (assuming you have an Audigy 1?)

 

[Lonyo]

I've got my old SB Audigy in my Win 7 machine and it works fine, no driver issues (as long as you let Windows driver update do the driver installing, and don't try and get a driver yourself!).

The reason I'm using mine though, is because the onboard sound sucks for my headphones in terms of volume (far too quiet), so I have my 5.1 speakers hooked up to onboard and I use the Audigy when I want to switch to headphones.

Both are fine, but there's no reason to use the Audigy unless you feel some special need to (like I do), but if you do want to use it (and assuming you are on Windows 7) then it should work without issue. I had more issues with XP and drivers than with Win 7 and drivers for my Audigy.

Oh, and if you are on an X58 that means you have a Core i7. Which means you really wouldn't ever need to care about CPU use of onboard sound

 

[Ertaz]

Thank you! looks like will just leave my case a little less cluttered.

 

[Lazlo Panaflex]

I've got my old SB Audigy in my Win 7 machine and it works fine, no driver issues (as long as you let Windows driver update do the driver installing, and don't try and get a driver yourself!).

The reason I'm using mine though, is because the onboard sound sucks for my headphones in terms of volume (far too quiet), so I have my 5.1 speakers hooked up to onboard and I use the Audigy when I want to switch to headphones.

Both are fine, but there's no reason to use the Audigy unless you feel some special need to (like I do), but if you do want to use it (and assuming you are on Windows 7) then it should work without issue. I had more issues with XP and drivers than with Win 7 and drivers for my Audigy.

Oh, and if you are on an X58 that means you have a Core i7. Which means you really wouldn't ever need to care about CPU use of onboard sound

I stand corrected Good to know, Lonyo. I'll just use Windoze update when I go to Win 7 w/ my Audigy 2.

 

[railven]

I have this card laying around. I plan on doing some light gaming and I have some basic stereo speakers hooked to it. Would it provide better audio or free system resources if I used it instead of the integrated sound on my Asrock x58 extreme? Or is it just too old to be relevant or worthwhile?

I had some issues with the X58 Onboard and I didn't know it was the culprit until I used a separate hardware.

While playing CoD4:MW MP I set the audio to 44khz and then high quality, I started noticing some drops in FPS (at first I assumed it was server lag.)

When I finally got my surround system up, 5.1 channels caused even more lag.

Retrospeccing, all my games had performance drops when turning the sound bitrate up from the default 22khz to 44khz. Hmmm...

ANyways, turned it off and got an X-Fi, and haven't had any drops in FPS in any game since.

I'm not a big fan of the ALC890, maybe I just got a bad chipset

 

[solofly]

For 99% of people the onboard sound is as good or better than any discrete sound card.

Thank God I am NOT one of those people...lol

 

[ExcaliburMM]

My SB Audigy ZS is noticeably better than my onboard sound.

 

[modestninja]

My SB Audigy ZS is noticeably better than my onboard sound.

In what way? Quality of sound or performance? Both?

 

[ExcaliburMM]

In what way? Quality of sound or performance? Both?

Quality of sound. Onboard is muddy, muffled, and once you turn it up sounds even worse. On a 4GHz 920, the 1-3% CPU usage that might come from using onboard is a non-issue.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

I use an Audigy 1 card in my Vista X64 Ultimate (sig) machine. It sounds quite a bit better when playing high quality mp3's (256-320kb VBR) than my onboard sound. I'd never go back to it. I pulled it from my brothers old S939 3500+ rig and haven't looked back.

One more plus on a dedicated sound card. The on-board (EVERY one i've seen) has a solid 100-300ms input lag. If you record your music w/ audacity, good luck getting tracks synced up. The lag from the audigy is non-existent.

 

[RussianSensation]

For 99% of people the onboard sound is as good or better than any discrete sound card. The amount of CPU power to run sound is less than 1%.

The improvement in sound quality on my Z5300e ($70 speakers) w/ X-Fi Platinum is unbelievable. I don't know what you have been listening to. It's like night and day, honestly. Unless you are one of those people who listens to Apple stock headphones? The only people who say that onboard sound is as good as a discrete sound card are those with $5 speakers or who have never ever tried a discrete sound card.

 

[jdjbuffalo]

The improvement in sound quality on my Z5300e ($70 speakers) w/ X-Fi Platinum is unbelievable. I don't know what you have been listening to. It's like night and day, honestly. Unless you are one of those people who listens to Apple stock headphones? The only people who say that onboard sound is as good as a discrete sound card are those with $5 speakers or who have never ever tried a discrete sound card.

I use SPDIF for my connection. I will agree that if you are still using analog cables that a discrete card would be better. As I said, my speakers are about $300 and I also pipe the sound through $300 receiver.

 

[Gew]

Guys. First off, let my say that I'm really pleased by the fact that this topic was brought up to begin with. Now, after a couple of month without new entries, I take the liberty of bumping this thread with my own experience slash situation.

Here's my deal. I have a motherboard with an integrated audio chipset called VIA VT1708S. I hardly play games, but I often listen to music and watch movies. Then, about a week ago, I was going to dump the trash in the garbage room of our apartment complex. I found a computer case. I brought it home with me (such a bum I am). It contained an ASRock (socket 478) motherboard, with a CPU that I (after removing thermal paste) could see was printed as an Intel Celeron 2.8GHz/533MHz bus. No RAM sticks, but an old 3Com ethernet adapter, and this Sound Blaster sound card.

I was pleased by all these free items. I remember in them early 90's, how much fun I had with my Sound Blaster 16 card, and this seemed like today's sucessor. I spoted the manufacturer stamp on the sound card, it had its (c)opyright stamped at 2004, i.e. it was roughly half a decade old. I spent the following afternoon by reading the Wikipedia article on the Audigy card(s). Interesting, indeed. I figured that this was the "Audigy 1", i.e. first generation of the card. I visited creative.com and fetched the latest drivers. Installed it. Card now works flawlessly.

However, my concern is just about the same as all other posters in this thread. Which of my audio chips is the big win in this? Should I stick with motherboard-integrated VT1708S, or use the Audigy? It feels kinda cool to kick and flip PCI audio, oldschool-isch alike.

Anyways, I'm no audiophile so I havn't noticed any difference at all by the two audio chips. However, guess I'm not all left in a "dumb-cloud" with two audio interfaces. For instance, I could run extended desktop out to my tv set, and pop a movie on the TV for our kids to watch, while putting my wife in the chair behind the computer monitor, and have my media player use one interface each for playback, thus allowing two "movie sessions" simultaneously. Guys, am I being ridiculous?

Cheers~

 

[TurtleCrusher]

Great find. It was difficult getting drivers for X64 vista, but overall it still works great. Keep it in there. Dedicated cards are almost always better. This even applies to on-board vs dedicated Ethernet. On-board always has added latency and uses up CPU cycles. Dedicated cards have built in accelerating hardware as long as the driver can utilize it.

At the time, it would have been so much smarter spending that extra $80-$120 on a much better processor. That was the difference between a Celeron 2.8 and a P4 3.0-3.2 w/HT. That person either was an amateur audiophile or didn't know what they were buying.

Either way you should try finding old ram sticks at thrift stores or something similar if you have them in Jamaica. A Celeron 2.8 is still good enough for most basic tasks. It's way faster than my usable netbook!

 

[nenforcer]

The problem with using Windows Update to acquire drivers for you sound card is that they are most likely Microsoft WHQL drivers which lack any sort of hardware acceleration and are written using strictly software hooks to be as compatible as possible.

The built-in drivers for Aureal Vortex sound cards in Windows XP plays sound just great but lacks any A3D hardware acceleartion in addition to DirectSound acceleration.

If you run DXDIAG.EXE and go to the audio portion you will see the tests fail when attempting hardware accelerated sound.

So you are relying strictly on CPU/Software acceleration with your HARDWARE based device.

 

[MagickMan]

The improvement in sound quality on my Z5300e ($70 speakers) w/ X-Fi Platinum is unbelievable. I don't know what you have been listening to. It's like night and day, honestly. Unless you are one of those people who listens to Apple stock headphones? The only people who say that onboard sound is as good as a discrete sound card are those with $5 speakers or who have never ever tried a discrete sound card.

If you use digital out there's no difference.

 

[Gew]

Thanks for your heads-up Scholzpdx!

The SB Audigy card is now smoothly installed on a PCI slot, and its working really nice. Only thing that bugs me (just a little a bit) is some sort of static noise that I've come across. If I plug my earphones into the integrated audio chip and pull all volume levers to max, I still have a clean vacuum in my ears, i.e. no sound at all.

However, when I plug my earphones into the SB Audigy card, and pull volume to max, I get this static noise in my earphones. Buzz, or whatever. I'll probably stick with my integrated sound after all!

 

[Auric]

If you use digital out there's no difference.

False. The quality still varies even for bitstreaming if only noise-wise. Of course for generated content both the quality and content vary a lot.

Thanks for your heads-up Scholzpdx!

The SB Audigy card is now smoothly installed on a PCI slot, and its working really nice. Only thing that bugs me (just a little a bit) is some sort of static noise that I've come across. If I plug my earphones into the integrated audio chip and pull all volume levers to max, I still have a clean vacuum in my ears, i.e. no sound at all.

However, when I plug my earphones into the SB Audigy card, and pull volume to max, I get this static noise in my earphones. Buzz, or whatever. I'll probably stick with my integrated sound after all!

Mute all the analog inputs.

 

[Gew]

Mute all the analog inputs.

Wow! The vague buzz/noise suddenly disappeared simply as I muted "Line-In". Strange, huh? My integrated VIA audio controller doesn't produce such artifacts even though all "levers" are activated and on max. Although, what's the meaning of having a Line-In lever on the "Output" side of sndvol32.exe? Perhaps it should consistently be muted? I'm no expert, so I wouldn't know. Ty anyways!

 

[MagickMan]

False. The quality still varies even for bitstreaming if only noise-wise. Of course for generated content both the quality and content vary a lot.

I've tried both, either way there's no noise. They both sound the same.