How much of a performance gain? Onboard -> Cheap-average sound card ?

[AmishSlayer]

Thread title says it all. I'm looking to try and squeeze out a little more performance from my computer. I have onboard sound right now and I was wondering how much of a performance gain I'd get by getting a cheap or average sound card?

Also, any suggestions for a card? I'm not an audiophile by any means. I just use headphones to listen to sound on my comp. Nothing fancy.

 

[giant384]

its not enough to make a big fps difference. at the minimum it may be around a 5fps boost. definitely a sound card is better because of quality sound.

 

[-Psy-]

My onboard audio sounds amazing to me.

 

[Barney Fife]

My onboard audio sounds amazing to me.

Your statement sounds amazing to me. :naughty:

 

[MRG]

There is a massive difference. Anyone that tells you differently, is talking out their ass. You tell them to go play their favorite game or listen to their favorite song on an old AC'97 built in "sound Card" 99.999% of the people that will tell you it makes no difference will either have an uber nice sound card like the X-Fi or are currently using onboard sound & so really have no clue.

While onboard sound has gotten better, it's in no way in the same class as a quality dedicated sound card. The base Audigy 2 (This card is cheap too!!)vastly out performs any onboard sound that I have ever tested & I have had my fair share of mobo's with onboard sound in my lifetime, not to mention those many..many..many clients PC's I have worked on over the years.

I have a guild typed up somewhere that i'll dust off & post here that goes into detail the difference between dedicated & onboard sound cards. Just gotta find it.

I'm sorry if I stepped on a few toes here & insulted a few of you with my "Ass" remark above, but if you are using onboard sound, you really have no clue as to what you are missing. Now i'm sure some onboard codecs are in fact great, hell, the 7.1 onboard sound that my current $50 motherboard has sounds great, but bottom line they just are not as good.

-MRG

 

[-Psy-]

But the most popular brand Creative make the worst drivers known to mankind. Seriously. I hate them.

 

[Sanada]

You might aswell get one anyway as their so cheap. I've had a Soundblaster Live! card for 5 years that cost me ?20 at the time and the sound is still better than some onboard chipsets. What CPU do you have? If it's quite old or a Celeron/Semprom then it might be good idea to get one. I doubt it'd make any difference with say a Core 2 Duo.

 

[AmishSlayer]

My CPU is an AMD 3200+

I don't know if I'll buy a sound card. I might invest in 2 1-gb sticks of ram instead if anything (way more pricey considering I have reg. DDR ram).

 

[Javert]

Visually, it will have NO difference unless you get a high-end card with its own onboard memory.

As for audio, you will have a great difference if you have a multi-speaker (more than two) setup with bass. If you watch DVD/HD movies on your computer, a sound card is almost required especially for Dolby.

 

[Adabiviak]

I used on-board sound and later bought a sound card to see if I'd get an increase in performance: none (although I don't think the games I was playing at the time were really taxing my system to the point of making a difference that way). Both my current sound card and the on-board system would connect to the same fiber optic cord driving my living room for Dolby 5.1 surround. If your system is currently being noticeably taxed, it may be worth it.

 

[Asus]

Just look at the ~$100 Creative cards if you want better performance.

What the newer Creative sound cards will give you is a better 3D experience. The game will sound different and more realistic because the sounds are tweaked with effects with EAX (5.0?). There is some performance gain in some games but usually it is just noted in games that can have a LOT of sounds at once and at different ranges (BF2, GRAW).

The other cards from other manufacturers won't give you that since they don't support EAX and don't use Creative chips. Well, they support EAX 2.0 but that is nothing. What they usually try to do instead is offer better sound quality for music. If you have mediocre speakers/headphones then you won't notice at all.

And Vista shot EAX down. Only hardware acceleration in Vista is through OpenAL if the game and card supports it. Creative cards do support OpenAL but the games list is limited. Creative did make Alchemy software for their cards in Vista so they can convert EAX sound into OpenAL but it only works for some games. Vista is mainly software sound and I'm not sure developers will want to switch to OpenAL from EAX and instead just do software sound on the CPU.