Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips (
More info?)
On Thu, 26 May 2005 12:26:28 -0700, Fisher <fisher@no_email.here>
wrote:
>I don't know about the other's so much but C-Media is pretty decent. I
>have that on my Asus mb and used it for a while and had no issues and
>the sound quality was ok. AC97 is just a standard and not a sound
>chipset although some mb's list their mb as having AC97 for sound.
>C-Media is also AC97. I think Realtek is supposed to be ok. My Abit
>mb has Realtek ALC650 but I have never tried it out.
Just to complicate things further, the chip is only one relatively
small part of the equation. I've got two systems, both with AC97
sound using C-Media CODECs. The first is an ASRock K7S41GX using a
CMI9739 chip. The second is a Chaintech 7NJL6 using a CMI7961A. The
difference in specs between these two chips is quite small, but the
difference in sound quality is very noticeable. The Chaintech board
has a much cleaner sound, sufficiently better that it's pretty obvious
with my only average-quality computer speakers.
Unfortunately audio is one of those tricky analog things where
subtleties in design can affect performance much more than
specifications.
> The only onboard
>sound solution that can match an add-on card like an Audigy2 is the
>Soundstorm that came on mb's with the Nforce2 chipset.
Virtually none of the nForce2 chipsets use the Soundstorm audio. My
above-mentioned Chaintech board certainly does not. Most of the
nForce1 boards used Soundstorm, but it was mostly dropped for the
nForce2.
> But I think all
>onboard sound these days is fairly decent for music, mp3's, internet
>radio etc. It's when you get into 3D audio in games that they may fall
>a bit short. I prefer to use add-on cards myself and have Audigy2 on
>one PC and Santa Cruz on the other. It all depends on what your PC
>usage is. I'm a gamer and is why I use add-on cards.
I find the integrated audio on my Chaintech board to be quite
sufficient for light-use, but I purchased a PCI sound card for the
ASRock board.
-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca