Sound: Onboard or this old piece of...

[Wandere]

In short, I'm in the market for a motherboard and the on-board sound may make a large difference in my purchase (Shuttle or Soyo or God-knows-what).

Currently using: Turtle Beach Montego A3D PCI. (I think "Xtreme" was on the box, it's been some time)

The on-board options I see here and there include AC97 and C-Media (some CMI with Creative (Gigabyte)).

Things that are spiffy:
-Low CPU usage
-Clear sound (no popping, crackling, etc).
-Well regarded, solid driver set (WinXP Pro)

Uses: (in this order)
-Games
-MP3's
-Divx playback
-CD's
-Recording screams for poorly planned Halloween pranks

I've never used the on-board stuff (not on this BH6 ) and I'm not certain how reliable/overclock tolerant it is. Quality needs to be fair or better (for those wonderful ambient sounds in games)...I'm no audiophile.

Thanks!

 

[GoldenTiger]

The CMI one is pretty good, and the sound on NFORCE boards is top-notch (Audigy/Live! quality) . AC97 is very basic, though it would be usable enough for games, just nothing spectacular (only decent or so).

 

[erub]

hey, i have that soundcard.Aureal2 based, right? Mine works great in WinXP, just used the default installed drivers...havent had any problems with it. I mainly use it for mp3z but it works for everything else too (well I can't verify games, right now I have a voodoo3, so i don't play much, but im getting a geforce3 ti200 in less than 10 days...so...yeah )

 

[RedShirt]

I paid 80 dollars for that card back in the day...

Ahh, Aureal, why did you go under...

 

[Wandere]

Hey, thanks folks. From what I've gathered, the Turtle Beach is superior to the AC97 but may be inferior to CM integrated solution. I think GT's right, AC97 won't cut it.

Heh, Yeah, I wish they hadn't gone under too...was a decent card in it's day but resource drain seems a little high under Win9X. Might not be so bad under XP.

Any thoughts on the overclocking of the bus and it's effect on a PCI vs on-board chip?

Have fun with the card erub, ready to install the same one (Visiontek) in my box.