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on board sound quality

S

sonik

Member
I'm about to upgrade and theres 1 thing keeping me from choosing between a board with an ISA slot and one without one... my ISA SB AWE64 soundcard. How would the sound quality from this compare to the on board sound on the newer mobo's, like the ECS K7S5A?
Also, I may not be understanding correctly what "on board" means... I'm thinking it means there's a speaker jack somewhere on the back... same with the on-board NIC. The only problem is that I don't see the jacks in the pics I've seen of the boards.
 

onboard = built-in with motherboard. i still think that a separate sound card would be better...... but i cant reccomend ISA though 🙂 and i believe that K7S5A has onboard sound.
 
I have the Epox 8k7a+ and it has onboard sound. I have three speaker jacks located near the Serial Ports. I just enabled it because my son needed my SBLive Value. Sounds not bad.
 
as their slowWell some computer are as fast est link. Having an ISA slot will hinder performance, I dont believe by a large amount, but the good thing about ISA is that it uses the most minimal CPU usage, unlike a PCI sound card, and I'm sure your SB card is way better than any AC '97 codec. Look for a motherboard with a KT133A chipset, fast stable and an ISA slot. Just stay away from CNR and AMR slots, useless devices.

Onboard means that the IC (integrated circuit) and the micro chip of the device usually found on ISA and PCI cards are directly on the motherboard (thus reducing less incompatabilities and sometimes faster)
 
Ur ISA sound card sound better.

On-board sound means tht there is a sound chip embedded onto the mobo & there will be speaker & mic jack on the mobo as well. The jack will be next to the printer port on most mobo.
 
The on-board sound on newer motherboards sounds much better than that old AWE64.

I have one PC with an ISA AWE64 in it, and sitting right next to it another PC with the Shuttle AK31A KT266A board with on-board sound. Played through the same speakers, the on-board sound has FAR less background noise.

<edit> The on-board sound of the ECS K7S5A is also better than the ISA AWE64.
 
It also depends on the power of your system. I use onboard sound with my Epox 8k7a and a 1.4 266fsb Tbird with 512 of ram, never had any hiccups of any issues. Well I killed my 1.4 and had to use my old 1.2 200fsb for a while with 256 of pc1600 ram. I had all kinds of sound issues. Hiccups galore! Got my new XP1600 and went back up to 512 PC2100 and all is well again.
 
Just wondering, does onboard sound cause a performance hit in comparison with using a seperate PCI sound card and if so how much? I have a Gigabyte 7VTXH which has onboard sound (creative 128) which I'm happy with. Just curious.
 
This really depends on what implementation is used. The ac '97 software codec sound isn't really very good, but several manufacturers use the same chips as used on separate soundcards, giving basically identical performance. The Creative ct5880 is one and there's another (used on epox boards and others) I can't remember at the moment. CPU usage is extremely low in any event- Might see some difference on a given benchmark, never notice it in real life....
 
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