Sound Card Compatibility Help

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therabidwookiee

therabidwookiee

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Jan 8, 2013
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I'm looking to buy a sound card so i can better utilize my Razer Tiamat 7.1 headset. It sounds decent now with my onboard sound (Playing Battlefield 3), but i hear it is extremely awesome with a dedicated sound card. I have never bought a sound card before and I currently do not have TOO much to spend on one.

I was thinking of getting this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829132013

Now.. i notice that it says that it is a PCI card. And here is the part that is confusing me.... My mother board has this between my GPU slots and right about it it says PCI 1.

|============== ====|


Now if you follow the link that i posted. You will notice that the sound card has 2 slits instead of just the one that my motherboard has. What does this mean? Does this mean that it is a different PCI port? or will it still work?

Any help here would be great!

 
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C12Friedman

C12Friedman

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Jan 25, 2012
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What motherboard and what graphics card do you currently have? I'm not an audiophile but the general concensus of what I have read indicates that until you get to the Xonar DX series, there isn't much (if any) improvement over on board audio, you might want to look into that
 
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C12Friedman

C12Friedman

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Jan 25, 2012
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The lightest of your light blue slots are PCI slots, that is where the sound card should fit. The Xonar has two slits (keys) indicating that it is a universal PCI card - there is a long story behind that but basically PCI has two different possible voltages - the keys were put in to prevent improper voltage but cards that can do either voltage available (universal) will have two key slits like the Xonar - it should work no problem
 
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TenPc

TenPc

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Jul 11, 2012
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I use onboard stereo out connected to an amplifier with two speakers. I can increase the volume via the amplifier (or Windows). I get good (great) sound either with the headphones or through the speakers. If you just want extra "3D" sound then use your amplifier. A soundcard offers more features than just audio out, however and could be put to good use.

24-bit 192KHz refers to the same audio as you'd get on an audio CD. Editing audio is better at 16-bit @144khz (wav) and 24-bit has to be forced to be accepted by most audio editing programs, if you ever intended on such a thing.

If you use the sound card, you will have to disable the audio option in the BIOS, you can't have both and hear them too. The option for the soundcard might disable front audio ports.

Many soundcards do rely on compatibility with the Video card, EAX is more inclined to be used with AMD (ATi) video cards but not altogether and may be suited to Nvidia grpahics card. If your Video card offers a sound port, that will be disabled with the use of the sound card.

The advert states Vista/Windows 7 however, the spec sheets says - "Windows Vista/XP(32/64bit)/MCE2005" so I"d say that you'd have issues with this sound card, it's manfacture date is 2005.
 
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