Onboard Sound vs Sound Cards
http://live.pirillo.com/ – Nik in the chat room wanted to know if it was better to have a dedicated sound card or if the sound card built into the motherboard was fine.
If you’re simply looking for everyday use, then the onboard sound is fine: you get basic environmental effects and sound control. Plus, modern computers often come with a digital out (and sometimes an optical output as well).
If you’re looking for a very high end audio experience, with fine-tuned controls, then you’ll probably want to go with an expansion card.
In Windows Vista buying an additional card for sound is less important than it used to be, because the engineers decided to get rid of audio hardware acceleration, so most the sound on a Vista system is handled mainly by the CPU.
What do you think Nik should do?
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5 Comments
anonymous
June 22nd, 2007
at 8:54am
I’m using onboard right now but my preference is a card. If I could I’d get a motherboard with just PS2 ports on it, no onboard anything else, but nobody seems to do that anymore.
anonymous
June 22nd, 2007
at 8:54am
I’m using onboard right now but my preference is a card. If I could I’d get a motherboard with just PS2 ports on it, no onboard anything else, but nobody seems to do that anymore.
Ryan
September 11th, 2007
at 3:18am
If you’re an audiophile, you will notice a difference between onboard audio, and expansion slot audio. Bass sounds are more subdued from onboard, simply because the onboard audio system does not have as much power as the PCI bus does. For functionality, onboard serves its purpose but not much more.
Alex Forbes
September 17th, 2007
at 5:50pm
I use the Reaktek AC’97 onboard audio controller on a recent high end ASUS board. I’ve read elsewhere that the onboards may outperform some of the consumer audio boards. I hope so, because I’ve aready recorded over 144GB of WAV from my CD’s. I can’t hear a difference between source CD and PC in play tests through midprice or high-end Klipsch.
So the difference can’t be powers of ten, but I always wonder. I know some onboard processors are or were really bad, and used to use Creative instead, but I found them and their drivers pretty high maintenance hardware.
I pipe the Realtek audio out directly to good quality receivers, so I don’t need or want the audio controls that come with some of the external USB audio processors. Do you and your readers feel I’m selling my audio short? What expansion slot audio is recommended?
Thanks — Alex
Johnson
June 26th, 2009
at 3:07pm
If you are into gaming, you might want to get the Creative Labs Audigy 2 Sound Card with EAX “Enviromental audio extensions” feature built in since a lot of games have EAX capablities for increase realism for sound.
But, onboard is good for system sounds, movies and music.