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Onboard sound

C

CaptianScooby

Member
I am plannning on purchasing one of these in a day or two and was wondering if i should use the onboard sound or buy a sound card (i have Klipsch 4.1's)? what should i do?
Please help and advise😕
 
onboardy + good speakers = being stupid.

cut the bull sh1t, get an audigy, ive had both game theater xp and audigy, the audigy sounds better overall. It just gives a bit more depth. sounds rich and full.

So yes buy a good sound card, and if the klipsch supports digital out mode then use that it will sound 10000000000 times better than analog
 
If the motherboard has AC97 sound, I would use a sound card. The AC97 doesn't sound that great, and it puts a load on the CPU. People have posted that the C-media onboard sound is as good or better than SB Live. I personally haven't heard the C-media, but I will come payday;p
 
Since you have a set of high end speakers, you might as well have a good sound card/sound chip to match it up with. If your motherboard has onboard PCI sound like the CMI 8738 (either the 4.1 like on the Iwill KK266 or the 5.1 on the Soyo Dragon series) those will work fine (as other have stated). If your mobo has onboard Creative 5880 sound (like on Gigabyte boards) the sound will be pretty decent as well. But again, since you spent so much of such high end speakers, you might as well buy the Sound Blaster Audigy, Hercules Game Theater XP, or at the very least, the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz.
 
well it depends.

are you going to play music and compose?

if not then onboard will be fine.

save your money and get a audigy later.

but also when you upgrade you can use this as a barebones comp and not have to waste more money
 
stang, sound solution using AC97 codecs does NOT imply that it's a CPU hog, nor does it imply poor output quality.

The sound engine in front of the codec is where all the sound processing work is done - or not done and offloaded to the CPU instead -
and the analog fiddly bits behind the codec are what makes good or bad analog output quality.

Bad example: VIA 686B or Intel 8xx chipset integrated sound engine. Very stupid engine, lots of CPU load.
Better: SiS and ALi chipset sound engines. More brain, less CPU load.
Good: SoundBlaster Audigy. Yes this does use AC97 codecs ... but with a very intelligent sound engine driving them.

Some standalone sound chips are mixed-signal, embedding the codec. This isn't quite feasible in high density silicon like
chipset south bridges or high-end sound processors - that's why these use separate codecs, and that's why AC97 (a _bus_standard_)
exists: To unify digital output format from whatever sound engine, so that sound card or onboard sound device designers have
some choice in what they do.

The analog output quality of any of the above is mostly a matter of analog design cleanliness of the board.
(Yes this is harder to achieve on the mainboard than on a card.)

The very same thing is going on with chipset integrated LAN - you have the MAC (the digital part, the brain) as a PCI chip or integrated
into the chipset, and the PHY (the codec if you please) connected through a standardized MII interface. Again, there are PCI LAN
engines that integrate a PHY into one single mixed-signal chip.

Bottom line, saying a board has "AC97 sound" or "Realtek 8201 LAN" is as wrong as it's pointless ... because it's talking
about the irrelevant piece of equipment and brilliantly missing the important one.

regards, Peter
 
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