• A Great friend to the HardForum with a great kid that he is trying to get a scholorship to continue his schooling. Please give hime a vote! Only 24 hours left! Thanks.
    If you have an VOTE FOR KEENAN!

5.1 Audio with Onboard

Z

Zekenstein

n00b
Joined
Feb 17, 2006
Messages
53
I have a question, a friend of mine and I both recently prucahsed 5.1 systems, he got a logitech and I a Klipsch. Now, I have a new PCI x16 motherboard with onboard audio and he has an older Socket A AMD motherboard. My question is, will the onboard audio suffice or will the sound qualtiy suffer without a higher quality add-on sound card from Soundlbaster or whomever?
 
I just got the X-530's and i use onboard sound. All though i here sound from all 6 speakers i dont feel its a true 5.1 surround setup. I tried setting hardware sound in BF2 to see if i could get true surround sound and it worked to solve the positional sound effects (what noise comes from behind comes through the rear speakers) but introduced choppy quality and i'm pretty sure i could hear everything that went on in the map like it was on top of me.

So now i wait to see if i can get a external sound card at a reasonable price.
 
The quality of the onboard audio depends a lot from the motherboard you have. Some of them are quite good, but usually the quality is not very good.
I myself have an Abit NF8 (some Realtek sound chip) now and the quality is not that good and the lack of settings in the drivers is really a problem. But atleast the quality is better than on my old Asrock which was total crap and the sound was really sensitive to cracking during high CPU usage. Then again both those onboard audio chips have worse quality than my old and trusty Sounblaster 128 :)
Getting a proper soundcard is on my what-to-buy-next -list.
So I recommend you should try out the onboard audio if it's any good and if it's not get a quality sound card.
 
Well, I don't know about my buddies, but my Onboard sounds as good as my Audigy 2 did before so I'll jus thave to see, if it sounds like shite I'll just get a card. Also, is that Fatal1ty X-Fi soundblaster as good as the price tag? Is the "X-Ram" really that much of an improvement in quality and performance?
 
The sound quality is the same. Only difference is that the card has more memory (2MB for the XtremeMusic and Platinum and 64MB for the Fatal1ty and Elite Pro) and it is supposed to improve performance, but I might not be a big difference.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top