Originally posted by: Kingofcomputer
Even CMI8738 6-ch based card costs about $20 after shipping.
You won't get much cash by selling Audigy and buying CMI8738 based card.
Forget about it. Try to cut corner at somewhere to get that $40 (assume you could see the Audigy for $60).
Heck, I found new CMI8738 cards at a computer show for $9 each. I bought one for my mom's PC, and it works just fine.
AC97 audio - it sucks (in my experience anyway). Plain and simple. It might be adequate for making Windows go BUNK when something's wrong, but it's not good for much else. In my experience, AC97 audio had trouble playing MP3's for me. Not good.
The CMI8738 chip is more hardware based, but it does have high CPU usage as far as soundcards go. Keep in mind, that's "high" in a relative sense - compared to other soundcards.
I've used the Shuttle AK35GTR, which is pretty similar to the one Dragon board from Soyo, don't remember which. I almost bought a Soyo KT266A board though. There were problems with static in games, but that seems to have been resolved with BIOS and driver updates.
Easy way to test if the onboard is ok: uninstall the Audigy, enable the Cmedia chip in BIOS, install drivers from
Cmedia's site, then install the drivers from
Windowsupdate, and give it a try. Cmedia is weird about driver updates - v639 is on their site, but Windowsupdate has 641. They seem to be slow to update their Download page for some reason.
You might want to check for a new motherboard BIOS file too if you experience static in games.
I think that the CMI8738 is one of the better budget sound solutions out there, though if you are looking for a motherboard with onboard stuff, the nForce's sound is supposed to be very good too.
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