Sound card and video card compliance?

[Montymouse]

Hi,
I'm buying a desktop and wish to install a quality sound card and quality video card, but wish to avoid conflicts. I'm thinking Maudio 10/10, or maybe a x-fi elite pro, any suggestions on good video cards that would sit happily with these?
Montymouse

New bit posted on 18 July:
Thanks to everyone for getting back to me. I'm new on here and just trying to work it all out.

What am I going to use it for? The chip is dual core 3.2, ram is 2GB, hard drive is 500GB. I used to do a great of deal of cubasing and post production - so the sound card will require a break out box, so I think I'm going for the X-fi elite pro, and at the moment, the GeForce 7900GTX. Budgets about £1400ish. I will be doing a lot of film/video. I don't do games. Any more comments on this would be appreciated. Montymouse.

 

[yourmothersanastronaut]

There won't be any conflicts, assuming the two cards occupy space that doesn't conflict with what the other needs.

What are you going to do with your desktop? I'm going to assume games, if that's acceptable.

Do you really need a sound card like the Elite Pro? I have an X-Fi XtremeMusic, and that's plenty good enough to take full advantage of Battlefield 2's incredible EAX effects, on maximum quality. The only tangible difference is that the more expensive cards have more onboard memory (which games don't take full advantage of) and a front panel. If that's worth $200 more to you, then by all means spend more. But you had better have a good speaker system to take advantage of the extra money.

If you plan on a multi-GPU configuration now or in the future, go with nVidia's video cards. Crossfire sounds good, but it's not a mature technology and you won't see the best performance for quite some time, when ATI's god-awful drivers get better. A 7950 GX2 is nVidia's current top-end GPU, but if you get that you don't need an SLI motherboard - it's two 7900 GPUs on two PCBs connected to a single PCIe slot. It's an SLI card for one slot.

An X-Fi (any card, really - I would get the XtremeMusic) and a 7950 GX2 would make love to each other in your case. What's your total budget?

 

[yourmothersanastronaut]

ATI's drivers are very buggy. I work in a visualization department, and we absolutely refuse to use ATI cards because their drivers conflict with our work - and they don't do OpenGL (which we use in anything that requires modeling) as well as other cards we use.

We've tried them in the past, and they failed to do what nVidia, Matrox, and until recently 3DLabs cards do. 3DLabs was recently purchased by Creative Labs, and now 3DLabs will be exclusively making cell phone displays.

 

[yourmothersanastronaut]

ATI's cards are great, don't get me wrong. They run a little warm, but that's why they have the loud cooler, right? :roll:

All joking aside, they do really well. Even the older X850 series is doing pretty well against the midrange GeForce 7 series. I've heard a rumor that the X1900 is hiding a DX10 feature, but I don't know where. And the X1900XTX is currently the fastest non-dual-PCB card available, as far as I know.

But I have no faith in ATI's drivers - and that's where performance is decided. Every video card company has its problematic drivers, but from what I've seen of their cards, their drivers/software failed to impress.

 

[cleeve]

ATI's drivers are very buggy. I work in a visualization department, and we absolutely refuse to use ATI cards because their drivers conflict with our work - and they don't do OpenGL (which we use in anything that requires modeling) as well as other cards we use.

This guy didn't say he works in visualization though...

For my pro 3d work I use Nvidia too, but for home use - gaming (even OpenGL!), video, and image editing - Ati's drivers are excellent.

So are Nvidia's gaming drivers, by the way.

And since reviewing videocards is something I do professionally, I've used enough of both of 'em to say that in my experience, if anyone is dissing gaming drivers of either company they're probably being a bit fanboyish about it.

Ain't nothing wrong with Nvidia or Ati gaming drivers. In fact, alot of people would argue that Ati's drivers offer better visual quality. Regardless, they are both solid, if you've actually used them in the past two years for gaming purposes...

 

[Montymouse]

I've eventually gone for a X-fi Xtreme (couldn't get the elite pro because computer company wasn't licensed to provide these) and a GeForce 7900GTX. Any thoughts on this? Montymouse