on board sound

[sperm]

Whats the deal with on board sound ?

once on-board sound used to be a cheapy option for ppl who wanted a budget solution and didnt want to fork out for a seperate card. the other risk is, if your sound components blow, you have to replace an entire board rather than a simple card.

now days you can get digital 5.1 on board, with all the bells and whistles, who would want more ?

but trolling through overclockers i notice some people use creative audigy cards and disable on board sound anyway

now im confused......

is on-board sound still inferior in some way ? does it consume mainboard/cpu resources somehow that a standalone card doesnt ?

my current computer has realtek AC97 on-board, but I also have a creative sb live 5.1 card that I could insert and disable the on-board in bios. is it just preferences, or something I would be much better off doing ??

[thingy]

It's got 5.1, lots of options yada yada, but still won't have the same quality as purpose built sound cards, and this is why people go out and get them.

Me, I don't have much of an ear for quality sound, so any old crap'll do. Depends really on how much you care personally about sound quality.

Going from your post, I'd say don't bother. A lot of those who do have ears for quality sound would tell you I'm talking shit and to keep as far away from onboard as you can. [shrugs]

[Al]

I recently bought a mobo with onboard sound (5.1) and graphics.

It's perfectly fine for what I need, but like thingy said, some people want higher quality. The graphics is equivalent to an MX440 I think, so pretty average...

I bought it because I had a low budget at the time, but if I want to upgrade I can. (the board was $150)

[RASPUTIN]

From what I can see onboard sound slows things down. I have 5.1 onboard sound and when I disabled it and put in an old sb live card it speed up BF1942 quite a but.

[MisterBishi]

I have an nforce2 mainboard with onboard 5.1 sound, which is every bit as good as most add-on sound cards for music but a decent add-on card takes more load off the CPU for certain tasks.

Some cards (such as the creative audigy) also decode mp3 onboard which, again, means less work for the cpu.

[Hired Goon]

Originally posted by MisterBishi
I have an nforce2 mainboard with onboard 5.1 sound, which is every bit as good as most add-on sound cards for music but a decent add-on card takes more load off the CPU for certain tasks.


Same here, I find onboard sound cuts the mustard quite nicely nowdays - so, if u're just listening to music and playing games it should be fine.

[Truephoenix]

On-board sound can eat up to about 15% of your CPU, whereas using a sound card its significantly less.
also none of them handle EAX quite the same as the creative's. and compatability is a bit of an issue.

[wolfpac181]

Onboard is good nuff..

honestly, most people just want cheap sound and don't want to pay the extra couple of $ for some "ultra duper super Sound Blaster" card they will never fully max out from the start.

Uses 15% CPU??? ummmm.... no. even if it DID, CPU's are so damn fast and speedy now, that it doesn't really matter.

[Truephoenix]

it really depends on the cpu as to how much it eats up.....
toms hardware had some benchmarks of a couple integrated sound chipsets versus the audigy and the audigy's did benchmark a few fps higher. not really enough to warrant going out and buying a sound card in my opinion. but some people think differently i guess.

[MisterBishi]

To eat 15% of the CPU you'd need either a real shitty CPU, really shitty drivers, or a game that was bodged together in a really shitty way.