Upgrade from Sblive 5.1 to anything else worth it?

[EquaLiZr]

I got the upgrade itch as i have pretty much replaced everything else in my system (cept mobo)

should i upgrade my sound card or get a new mobo with soundstream or something?

would upgrading sound card lessen CPU unilization?

[UltimaParadox]

I got the upgrade itch as i have pretty much replaced everything else in my system (cept mobo)

should i upgrade my sound card or get a new mobo with soundstream or something?

would upgrading sound card lessen CPU unilization?


It would lessen it slightly, I really dont think you will see that much of an audio quality increase if you are using it with those Z-540s. As always if you upgrade to a new motherboard with onboard sound, the cpu utilization will be more but nowadays its negligible

[Craftish]

Although I can't find the link to that review where they tested CPU utilization versus framerates, it's actually not always negligible in many of the newer games, at least for no hardware acceleration versus full. That said, the difference in CPU utilization between an SB Live and say an Audigy 2 ZS is almost definitely negligible, although the latter can do EAX 4.0 support, etc.