Do USB headphones benefit from a good sound card?

Wabbit

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Feb 20, 2002
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I have a pair of USB headphones with a microphone that I use for FPS gaming, mainly Battlefield 2142. It includes a microphone for using Teamspeak, which is the main reason I went with them, as well as ease of use.

I thought of getting a nice 5.1 sound card, mainly to offload some of the processor resources for sound, for petter gaming performance, but am I right to think that if I install this card, but then use the USB headset, the games will not use resources of the sound card, but rather the USB driver software and CPU time anyways?

Thanks!
 

halcyon

Splendid
USB Audio will not offload anything from the CPU...in fact, I've read that USB audio devices may actually slightly increase CPU usage compared to onboard audio. I doubt its enough to affect performance, noticably, especially when using a dual-core CPU.
 

FTCold

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Your best bet is to get the soundcard. It will give you better overall performance, better overall sound quality and you'll be better able to control your sound options.

USB headphones are great if you're not going to do anything but use ts/roger/vent with them but I wouldn't waste the money if you are going to play any sort of FPS. Hearing Footsteps makes ALL the difference.

I have the X-Fi Xtreme music, AHS-515's and have tweaked my sound to drown out most background noise in the maps (America's Army) which allows me to better hear doors/footsteps/reloads/swapping weapons/etc.
 

Wabbit

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Makes sense, but I am no audio expert. How did you tweak your sound settings to get those sounds? I mostly play BF2142 and a lot of the effects, mainly explosions, drown out everything, including buddies on TS.
 

Marco_polo

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MMMmmm USB ITS MORE FOR LAN THAT for WAN FPS GAMING.... when you play at home you usually used the same pc everyday but when u play at lancenter or some place u will feel different ... With Usb sound card u will have the same sound config in the lancenter as ur home....


for me, its the only PRO(and its good one), cuz we are right that usb sound card its not a CREATIVE SOUNBLASTER PRO 2028 DDDXH = ) ! ...
but do the Job ....


Steel Sound 5HV2 USB
Sennheiser pc165 USB
GameComPro1 USB
DSP-500 USB