On Board Sound?!?!?!?

[1967mustangman]

I am looking at getting a motherboard with on boards sound. It is an Epox and it has Creative CT5880 4-channel audio on it and I was wondering if it was any good? I have heard in the past that on board sound in bad! Can you help?

 

[HexVector]

Well in most cases I would say yes. Although it determines how much you care about audio.
Obviously, if you have low end speakers it doesn't really matter. Whats do you like? The motherboard or the
onboard sound?

 

[pen^2]

avoid pc97 audio at all costs. it sounds so-so, but hogs cpu cycles and starts making fuzzy jitters after about half an hour of usage. i had this happen to me with the newest mobo bios and ac97 drivers, go figure :|

 

[birddog]

most on-board sound solutions take some CPU resources that a stand alone soundcard does not. One example I have experience with. I often play a audio CD while playing UT or Serious Sam, I tried this with a system I built for a co-worker using the on-board sound and it bogged down the game to where it was noticible jerkey (PIII 800 & GF2MX video). I added a basic $15 Yamaha soundcard & never had the problem again. I also notice a quality difference in the sound when I hook up my good Altec Lansing speakers up to the on-board sound (the best sound quailty souncard I have ever had was an old AWE64, much better than the SB Live card I replaced it with).

If you are not into gaming, or using your computer as a Hi-Fi stero, the on-board stuff will do fine. If you are into gaming, than I'd get a dedicated soundcard (it does not have to be a real expensive one either -- cheap soundcards are still better than on-board sound).

I'd go ahead & get the motherboard. Try out the on-board sound, if you like it -- good deal. If you don't like it, you can always disable it & put in a soundcard.

 

[1967mustangman]

Thank you all of you! This has been very helpful!

 

[Peter]

There are various flavors of onboard sound. But whatever it is, a separate PCI sound chip or chipset integrated sound, the question is that an intelligent engine in there, or does the main CPU have to do all the work.

C-Media 8738 and Creative 5880 are popular PCI sound chips with a good and intelligent engine that won't eat too much CPU time - just like an average sound card - and so is the integrated sound in SiS chipsets, and AFAIR ALi's is a good one too.

On the other hand, Intel's and VIA's chipset integrated sound engines are incredibly stupid, and need heavy CPU assistance. If it's not for the basic bleep sounds and music replay, avoid.

regards, Peter