on board sound good enough?

[Bosozoku]

Planning my next box, and I'm pretty far out of the current hardware knowledge loop. I'm leaning towards a MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum and using a SB Audigy2 ZS. But curious if the onboard sound is good enough to forego "supporting" CreativeLabs, which I'd rather not give any more of my money.

Sound is primarily for gaming, I don't play|edit music nor watch DVDs on my computer. I own a stereo, a tv/dvd/theater, and a well-worn comfy couch.

Thanks in advance,
Bos

 

[Mr5oh]

I have no ideal why people have the assumption that on board sound is bad. Maybe in the past it wasn't as good as Creative cards, but today the truth is that the on-board sound is great for alll purposes.

Consider it like this, you look at two radios, one has a higher signal to noise ratio. However this difference is measurable, not audible.

Normally with a real high-end sound card, you may be able to measure a difference, but you aren't going to hear it.

Save the money and just use the on-board, it'll sound great.

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[Obtuse]

For the Record, I have onboard sound on my K8N Neo Platinum and have had no problems getting it to work. It sounds fine, and I have a 5.1 setup, so I've been able to test the 3d sound abilities.

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[endyen]

Easy answer- try the onboard sound, if it isn't good enough, get a card.

 

[Spitfire_x86]

Ditto

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[ChipDeath]

Spending the extra on some good speakers will give you more of an improvement in sound quality than getting a better sound card.

The only real differences are stuff like EAX hardware (for adding environmental effects/echos etc, without any real performance hit), and the amount of CPU cycles that are 'stolen' by the on-board sound. I've never found EAX adds that much to a game (but with a really good surround setup it might.. *shrug*)..

As for using up CPU time, THG did an <A HREF="http://www6.tomshardware.com/game/20030405/index.html" target="_new">article</A> on this sort of thing a while ago. It's a bit old now, but shows the basic premise. Looking at some of the <A HREF="http://www6.tomshardware.com/game/20030405/sound_for_games-03.html#quake_3" target="_new">benchmarks</A> You can see the effect on games of good audio processing hardware.

<b>But</b>, (and this is a big but) the Doom III engine (which will be powering a lot of future games for the next few years) in its present form <b>DOES NOT</b> actually make use of any of this hardware - it's audio is done entirely on the CPU, so a better sound card will make no difference in this case. They may change this with a patch, but maybe not. Other game engines will likely benifit though.

So basically, quality-wise, it'll make little difference, and performance-wise, a good sound card <i>might</i> give a couple of % extra performance - but with a decent A64 system you're extremely unlikely to notice that anyway .

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[ChipDeath]

Or, to put it more succinctly:

try the onboard sound, if it isn't good enough, get a card.

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[BeyRevRa]

I have the platinum and you can do echo (and other) effects with it without any problems. The Platinum series has VERY good onboard sound.

AMD 64 3400+
MSI K8N Neo Platinum
1 GB Kingston HyperX PC3200
ATI AIW 9600XT
WD Raptor 74GB

 

[ChipDeath]

I'm not saying you <i>can't</i> do them - Just saying that a lack of hardware EAX will mean such things will incur a performance hit as the CPU is doing the work, where they're used.

<i>Anything</i> can be emulated in software, you could theoretically perfectly emulate a Radeon 9800Pro in software and have graphics of that quality - even if using an ancient 4Mb S3 card - But it would run at 0.00001FPS or something equally pathetic :lol:

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[Spitfire_x86]

With Athlon64s, he won't lose much performance. And the performance gain from hardware EAX acceleration is not worth the price of Audidy2

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