Soundcard question
Community Forums/General Help/Soundcard question
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| I am planning to buy a new PC, this PC comes with onboard 7.1 surround sound. My question is, is it necessary to purchase a soundcard for the PC like Creative Xi-Fi or Titanium? I have never bought a PC with onboard sound so want to know what other people's experiences are ... Also with onboard soundcard, do you get lag when playing games? What happens to games that contain EAX? Will onboard sound emulate that? I know with Vista the entire sound api was overhauled ... |
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| Most onboard chips these days have 7.1, support H-D and digital audio passthrough too. There may be instances (Often codec related, though) of choppiness and lag in intensive games, usually caused by the CPU struggling already. Provided the graphics card and CPU can handle the game well enough, an onboard chip will work fine. A separate soundcard these days is a bonus/luxury, unless music and sound are especially important. |
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| I've always* used onboard sound without any problems. My current setup (realtek HD audio) has all manner of effects I can use for reverb, echo etc (I'm assuming that's basically what EAX is). * I once paid a small fortune for an AWE64 Gold soundcard, which was a big waste of money. |
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| Thanks for you advice. Another question, this PC comes with an ATI 4890 GFX card which I believe is a pretty fast card. I know with windows 7 we should be looking at DX 11 cards but the price they are selling this PC at is very affordable considering the high end stuff they putting in it ... so is it worth getting a DX 11 card now? Also I have bought Nvidia for a long time whats your opinion of ATI cards? |
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| I was looking for a way to squeeze a few extra fps out of my gaming pc. Have a socket 754 athlon64 3000+ and AGP 7800GS. I've used the onboard sound for a longtime, had the xbox audiochip which was very low latency with Nvidias own drivers. But now I'm on windows 7 I'm stuck with realtek drivers which aren't so good and much of the audio processing is now done in software instead of hardware. I decided the one thing left for me to try was a new soundcard so I got a refurbished XiFi gamer for $40 from the local store and though it didn't make a huge difference in Risen, it is noticeably smoother in key areas like combat, plus the sound quality is MUCH better. Previously I had to use SRS sandbox to boost the bass and range of the onboard sound, I installed that now, the XiFi is MUCH better and has quick one click settings for entertainment, games and authoring. Thought it was a bit lame at first, but turned out to be really useful. Especially on an older PC like mine. Oh, there are tons of threads about creative drivers in windows 7. Looks like they fixed them in the last 4 months. Runs a treat and so far no problems whatsoever :) |
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| I must admit, Ive been well in the ATI / AMD camp for a while now, and though I dont have any issues with nVidia, I simply prefer to stick to what I know. I have used a 4850 card which I assume cannot be too much different, and it's not sparklingly new or superfast, it's certainly competitive and at a very good value price. Again, it comes dow to what you really want to do with it. I dont have experience of Windows 7 or it's display arhitecture, though if it follows from Vista it does utilise a bit more on the graphicss front than XP and previous though DX11 isn't essential. Where it really counts, is games playing (or creating if your Blitz creations are whoppingly heavy on the graphics!) Unless you're after playing the latest games with the best hi-res graphics at huge resolutions, then the card should be perfectly adequate. |
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| - for the vast majority of users, onboard audio works good enough. I've been using it for years without issues. The only reason I used a dedicated soundcard in my last PC was that the onboard audio only had three outputs which it used for its surround osund, and that there was no plugin to connect the microphone to at the same time... So I used a stand-alone card with 5 ports so I could connect both simultaneously. When I bought my current PC a few years ago I made sure that it had enough onboard sound connectors, and everything has been working great. (Modern soundcards can remap the input/output ports, so if you use surround sound setups some of the ports may function differently than in stero mode) - As far as video is concerned: it varies a little depending on the games you play. I have an ATI 4670 card which plays everything I throw at it (which isn't too bleeding edge, though) -- I'd say just try it, and see if the card holds up for you. ATI vs. NVIDIA isn't that big a deal -- they both have pros and cons, and after all these years they still go neck-on-neck performance wise. This week one is ahead, next week it's the opposite again. I've never had problems with ATI myself, and wouldn't hesitate to buy another ATI card. |
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