Should I buy a sound card?

[Hikari]

I used to have an nf2 board and it worked pretty well. Now my 945g system has onboard as well, and can sent a DTS stream to the receiver apparently (never seems to work, though).

I have a Z680 speaker set, and play a few games in addition to listening to music. Right now I just play a MMORPG in beta , HL2, some Farcry, BF2, and Morrowind. Will a real sound card change things much? Anything I'll notice?

TIA!

 

[Excelsior]

No, a new soundcard won't change much.

 

[Eureka]

Um, probably not unless you get a good sound card.

And Hikari... what, are you upgrading your entire computer?? So many postss

And no, I'm not human.

Norm

 

[Hikari]

lol.

Nah, just having a few issues lately. My 945G system is giving me a lot of issues, I am getting really bad memory performance on it, and I think my XP-90 isn't cooling properly as I'm getting 55C.

I do have an Audigy Notebook card in my laptop which is pretty nice, but that computer is a bit more hurt by CPU usage when doing sound I think, than the desktop.

EDIT: MSI doesn't keep their drivers current. I got the newest ones from Realtek's site, and now the DTS encoding (nice, reminds me of my nforce2) works fine.

 

[PorscheMaD911]

No. Only get a new sound card if you're really into games (Creative for EAX 4.0) or music (Chaintech AV-710s are cheap and sound great) or both (run the aforementioned two cards in a dual card setup). Although I'm quite happy with my SB Live for games, and your onboard probably canes that!

 

[GOREGRINDER]

Creative SB X-Fi Xtreme Music EAX5.0(Game Mode,Entertainment Mode,Audio Creation Mode) $111.00

very high clearity,very nice tone,music jumps out of your speakers

 

[Hikari]

LOL. I did see that, pretty good price. So I take it the 64MB of RAM the more expensive ones have doesn't change much for just games or music?

 

[Eureka]

Actually... I don't think anything uses the RAM.

Norm

 

[Hikari]

Thanks. Saw some reviews online and didn't see a point. Since I'm replacing this motherboard in January I'll get that cheaper xifi card, too.