Onboard or dedicated

[Lil_Biatch_UK]

Lo all,

would like to ask a simplish question as i've radically differing answers from mates

IS IT BETTER TO USE MY MOBO SOUND OR MY VIDEOLOGIC SONICFURY?

the sound card is a 44.1 kHz 16 bit 5.1 card the mobo is an MSI K8TNEO.



See you at the end of my scope

 

[r2k]

The Videologic Sonic Fury (which is the same card as Turtle Beach Santa Cruz) is the better choice as it has hardware acceleration for 3D positional APIs used in games (e.g. EAX) and it has a much better sound quality than the one onboard the mainboard.

 

[9Nails]

Right. The dedicated card had hardware support for EAX, Etc... But what sort of improvement would he see? Maybe a 5% CPU reduction for WinAmp? Perhaps 2 or 3 FPS more in Quake 3?! Or, do you think we're talking 30 FPS more?

I'm also using the onboard audio on my Intel PERL motherboard. I either play with headphones or in 2.1, and the audio is just fine for me. And I can be picky about that stuff! Also, with my Pentium 2.8 HT CPU, frames per second are creamy smooth even with the onboard audio.

My SB Live 5.1 sits in a box...

 

[blah]

If you have no problems running onboard one, why do you want to put another pease of hardware into your PC if you only listening to Winamp and play some of the games (which your onboard supports fine)? If it is cool and no crashes, why bother. I would not worry about it, but I play UT all the time, so I have to use MX300 to put some hear up on my head >

..this is very useful and helpful place for information...