Realtek ALC850 or Audigy 2 ZS?

[Slaimus]

CPU usage difference between onboard and dedicated are not really noticable unless the game is somehow badly programmer, even when using EAX. I personally would vouch for kX as the driver to use. It is very easy to write your own effects in kX.

 

[Eight Bit]

I'm in a similar situation trying to decide between using the Realtek ALC850 onboard audio on my A8N-SLI motherboard or using the Audigy 2 ZS I just bought. My problem is that my case has front panel audio connectors which I'd really like to use, however unfortunately it doesn't look like the Audigy 2 ZS has hookups for front panel audio whereas my motherboard's onboard audio does. Does anyone know of any internal sound cards which support front panel audio connections? If not, I guess I'll need to decide whether to use my onboard audio and the front panel connections for convenience, or use the Audigy for better performance and sound quality and have to crawl back behind my machine to switch between my mic/headphones and my speakers. 🙁 Any suggestions? Thanks.

 

[DVad3r]

Wow totally off topic, but I can't get my creative audigy 2 ZS platinum to work with my asus SLI premium. Everything installs fine, but when I go to device manager, it tells me that under other devices, my PCI Bridge controller has a ? next to it, so I guess that's causing the problem, anyone have a solution?

Post is here http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=32&threadid=1709230&enterthread=y

 

[Kenzan]

Originally posted by: watek
don't the realtek use like 50% cpu in games!?!

Depends on which one, the latest ALC850 (used on a lot of the better nForce4 boards) uses less then the new Creative Labs X-Fi. Take a look at the results here from GamePC

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=xfi&page=6&cookie%5Ftest=1

 

[Capt Caveman]

Originally posted by: Kenzan

Originally posted by: watek
don't the realtek use like 50% cpu in games!?!

Depends on which one, the latest ALC850 (used on a lot of the better nForce4 boards) uses less then the new Creative Labs X-Fi. Take a look at the results here from GamePC

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=xfi&page=6&cookie%5Ftest=1

Your link shows a .5% difference which is no difference. Here's a real test that shows that the premium's onboard sound can use up to 30% cpu utilization during game play.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2562&p=6