Noob Question: How much of an Impact do sound cards have?

[chronius]

In regards to system performance, does a sound card deliever noticable system performance gain? aside from sound quality?

 

[sojrner]

depends on the card. Creative cards have a dedicated processor that handles the computations for positional sound and decoding duties. Most other cards do not, and rely on the codecs to be run on the cpu.

All of them give you better quality simply b/c the components are moved further away from the mobo traces.

I say all of this irrespective of brand favoritism. Creative has made some stinker cards, but the x-fi currently is very good. The powerful proc on it does alot of work. Sounds great for consumer level.

There are others that are good too, some better in the past than what they are now.

As for tangible performance gains... you would have to see raw benchmark numbers as I am not even sure you could perceive the diff by just playing a game... Buy one for the quality improvement, if you are after just performance your $ can be spent better elsewhere.

 

[chronius]

depends on the card. Creative cards have a dedicated processor that handles the computations for positional sound and decoding duties. Most other cards do not, and rely on the codecs to be run on the cpu.

All of them give you better quality simply b/c the components are moved further away from the mobo traces.

I say all of this irrespective of brand favoritism. Creative has made some stinker cards, but the x-fi currently is very good. The powerful proc on it does alot of work. Sounds great for consumer level.

There are others that are good too, some better in the past than what they are now.

As for tangible performance gains... you would have to see raw benchmark numbers as I am not even sure you could perceive the diff by just playing a game... Buy one for the quality improvement, if you are after just performance your $ can be spent better elsewhere.

Thanks. I havn't really ever paid much attention to sound cards because I thought onboard sound would do the trick. Thanks for your reply.

 

[sojrner]

not a prb man, that is what these forumz are for.

 

[chronius]

not a prb man, that is what these forumz are for.

Hehe. boy am I glad I found these forums. now if only i could just give someone my money and they could build me a kickass rig. i wouldn't have to worry about this!