Originally posted by: Solarium
How much improvement is this over Soundstorm (the Nforce 2 mobo onboard sound), or this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16829120103
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Depends upon the source (games or music) and the amp and speakers.
SoundStorm has below average quality analog output, a DSP for hardware acceleration, up to EAX2 and may have OpenAL support (are drivers still updated?). AV-710 (low-end of the Envy24 controller series) has average to good stereo analog output and below average surround, no DSP (host based processing), up to EAX2 and no OpenAl support.
So the SS would have an edge in games and if external DAC's were used then stereo digital output would not suffer and real-time surround digital output would suffer less (avoiding the poor DAC's but suffering compression by the encoder).
But neither are comparable to the X-Fi and it is reflected in the price. Indeed, even an Audigy 2 Value would blow them both away for general use without costing significantly more in dollar terms (although significantly higher on a percentage basis).
In short, you may want to consider the $45 Audigy 2 Value versus the $60 X-Fi.