xMAGIUSx
Weaksauce
- Joined
- Oct 8, 2020
- Messages
- 65
The rig that I'm about to replace is an i7-3770K with a 980TI and has a Sound Blaster Z installed. Eight years ago, all the top gaming rigs had dedicated sound cards but that no longer seems to be the case.
Both my headphones and the Klipsch 2.1 setup sound great to me, but I will admit to not being an audiophile. At the time, I went with the Sound Blaster Z over motherboard audio (which also happened to be Sound Blaster) because it not only increased FPS by a few percent, but also offered 3D sound. Is 3D sound still used today?
The new rig will likely be a 5900X with a 3080 (Don't have a final build list yet, but that's the performance level I'm shooting for)
Would using a card like the Sound Blaster AE-7 (or an Asus or EVGA card) in a modern rig yield better performance, even if only marginally, by offloading sound processing from the CPU? My google searching has yielded mixed results on this subject. Some sources say this functionality was broken starting in Vista but Microsoft's website seems to suggest it's still possible.https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/audio/hardware-offloaded-audio-processing
It seems that external DACS/Amps setups are the rage these days, but with their USB interface they don't seem to offer quite the same benefits of the internal cards. I am aware that having the DAC/Amp externally isolated from the rest of the PC is desirable for sound quality purposes, but what about performance?
Is this all a moot point for gaming nowadays since the processor will have 12C/24T?
Thanks for reading all of that! Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Both my headphones and the Klipsch 2.1 setup sound great to me, but I will admit to not being an audiophile. At the time, I went with the Sound Blaster Z over motherboard audio (which also happened to be Sound Blaster) because it not only increased FPS by a few percent, but also offered 3D sound. Is 3D sound still used today?
The new rig will likely be a 5900X with a 3080 (Don't have a final build list yet, but that's the performance level I'm shooting for)
Would using a card like the Sound Blaster AE-7 (or an Asus or EVGA card) in a modern rig yield better performance, even if only marginally, by offloading sound processing from the CPU? My google searching has yielded mixed results on this subject. Some sources say this functionality was broken starting in Vista but Microsoft's website seems to suggest it's still possible.https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/audio/hardware-offloaded-audio-processing
It seems that external DACS/Amps setups are the rage these days, but with their USB interface they don't seem to offer quite the same benefits of the internal cards. I am aware that having the DAC/Amp externally isolated from the rest of the PC is desirable for sound quality purposes, but what about performance?
Is this all a moot point for gaming nowadays since the processor will have 12C/24T?
Thanks for reading all of that! Any insight would be greatly appreciated.