Onboard sound??

[MusicSoundsBetterWithYou]

I was llokin into a system upgrade, but i want a turtle beach santa cruz, which will overrun my budget. As i have a home sound system in my room all i will be doing is playin mp3's. The ECS 735 board has a AD 1881 sound chip. Will this be functional for mp3's? what can it be compared to?

 

[Vette73]

On-Board sound is pretty good now aday. The C-media is my fave. , But you can always turn it off and get C-Media sound card for around $20 from eBay

 

[Kingofcomputer]

2 types of onboard sound -
1. a chip same as the one found on sound card soldered on the motherboard
2. chipset embedded sound processing engine plus a ac97 codec chip

for 1, good or bad is depended on the same sound card.
for 2, good or bad is depended on the sound processing engine power and features.

 

[kursplat]

As i have a home sound system in my room all i will be doing is playin mp3's

why not pump the MP3's through you home setup?
good luck

 

[Peter]

ECS 735? K7S5A you mean? That uses chipset integrated sound, plus either a Realtek ALC stereo codec, or a C-Media 9738 4-channel codec.

Either way, analog output quality is very pretty (I have the stereo version at home, connected to quality HiFi). As for any kind of audio solution, you must make sure you don't have any system bus hogs in there that block the audio stream for too long - that would cause crackling artefacts. PCI VGA is a big no-no.

regards, Peter