onboard sound Vs PCI sound card

Hi

i have always used onboard sound and never had any problems but i see lots of posts saying onboard isnt as good as a seperate sound card.

on a moderd motherboard is there any difference or advantage between something like 5.1 onboard sound and a 5.1 PCI sound card?

also i use a simple headset to play games etc...does that mean 2.1 sound is fine for me as 5.1 the other channels wont be used right?

cheers.

thanks for the reply crashman

i have read that onboard sound uses up alot more CPU power than PCI sound cards. is this true for moderd onboard sound?

It really depends on several factors. Certain Creative soundcards still have a very high CPU load compared to older technology, but still lower than onboard codecs with similar features. So a huge exception here were boards with the nForce APU, which had high CPU load but not as high as without the APU, very competitave with Creative's soundcards for example.

Formerly, many boards actually used hardware sound chips onboard. So even back then onboard sound didn't mean high CPU loads as compared to similar sound cards.

It's always a case of looking at exactly which onboard solution you're comparing to exactly which sound card. Onboard sound generally uses more CPU power, but not always.

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