Gaming sound card

[Turvs]

I just want a good but cheap sound card for gaming. But i also listen to music and movies sometimes. The headphones i use are sennheiser 151 headphones.

Thanks

 

[kiren]

While once onboard audio was very poor quality and often generated noise, in my experience modern (PhenomII/core2 and newer) boards typically have audio as good as any you'll get without investing in a fairly expensive card, particularly since you are using headphones and therefor don't really need things like DDL etc. just IMO of course.

 

[Petrofsky]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that all PC audio is exactly the same at the line out jack, be it a card or a mobo, no matter how much you spend. To all intents and purposes. Unless you're a recording studio. The difference between good and bad speakers or headphones is infinitely greater than any slight difference between PC audio arrangements, which all produce sound adequately linearly across the range of human hearing at very low distortion levels. The engineers have that pretty much dicked in the new millennium.

If you want to throw money at your sound (I know I do), put it into better headphones or speakers, not that the ones you have are bad. How do you like the Sennheiser PC151s? I'm looking for headphones right now.

 

[Kewlx25]

Some poorly implemented soundcards pick up line noise from your computer/etc.

My integrated realtek sounds just fine to me and was implemented well since I hear no line noise at all. it has a 96db sig:noise which is about 100xs more than a 116db soundcard, but oh-well. Rather spend the $150 on a better videocard.

 

[MagicPants]

The cheapest sound card with any benefit over typical onboard audio is the creative labs x-fi titanium pci-e (around $90).

It's upside is that it can process more 3d sounds in hardware than would be feasible otherwise. I hear it's really good for Battlefield type games.

The downside is that it has driver incompatibility issues especially with openAL games ("Mass Effect" for example) which it will cause your computer not to run without any explanation.

 

[Kewlx25]

the funny thing is openAL is the ONLY way to do hardware accel'd 3D sound in Vista/Win7

 

[gamerk316]

The best soundcard for under $100 is the ASUS DX. If you want something more "gamer oriented" [and yes, thats meant to be sarcastic], pick up the Auzentech Forte for around $130 or so. Just don't buy Creative...

And anyone who claims that a good soundcard [Good implying non-Creative] will sound the same as onboard needs to have their ears waxed.

 

[kiren]

The best soundcard for under $100 is the ASUS DX. If you want something more "gamer oriented" [and yes, thats meant to be sarcastic], pick up the Auzentech Forte for around $130 or so. Just don't buy Creative...

And anyone who claims that a good soundcard [Good implying non-Creative] will sound the same as onboard needs to have their ears waxed.

Well, I said without a fairly expensive card, which $100-150 is for me, thats typically my budget for a GPU or CPU...

 

[Kewlx25]

The best soundcard for under $100 is the ASUS DX. If you want something more "gamer oriented" [and yes, thats meant to be sarcastic], pick up the Auzentech Forte for around $130 or so. Just don't buy Creative...

And anyone who claims that a good soundcard [Good implying non-Creative] will sound the same as onboard needs to have their ears waxed.

well... the digital output sounds the same unless comparing 3D sound streams.

 

[Turvs]

Well on my current Pc which is broken the sound is good but then im using a laptop until its fix and i plugged in my headphones and the sounds 10x better even though the laptop speakers are rubbish. And i just though a cheap gaming graphics card for about £20-£50 would make it much better and better for gaming. My onboard sound on my PC is 7.1 but very poor quality compared to what the laptop is.