• 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!

Saving CPU

C

Corvette

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 12, 2002
Messages
1,271
I was reading up on the X-Fi and it seemed that Sound Blaster is the only company that makes sound cards that actually reduce CPU load. If that isn't true, then was is the best deal on sound cards that actually have the feature.

I was also concerned when I read about SB's bloated drivers (they come with a lot of software). Are there other options when it comes to SB drivers?

I could be completely mislead as well, and please correct my misinformation.

Thanks,
Vette
 
I always figured that don't matter what a soundcard will take load off the CPU by utilizing the PCI bus. If it has the special 'exta' feature or not. Chances are that you wont notice a read-world difference either way.
 
I was looking at http://us.creative.com/products/pro...208&product=15853&nav=technicalSpecifications vs. http://us.creative.com/products/pro...208&product=15855&nav=technicalSpecifications which seems to confirm that a sound card needs a processor of some kind. Also, the point of getting the card would be to have one that would perform two functions, sound better than on-board and give me the peace of mind knowing my CPU is doing more important things :cool: Just improving sound does not seem worth spending money on, especially since listen to the in-game sound so rarely.
 
I have a creative card, no software bloated whatsoever. Just the driver and the EAX console. That's all I need and that's all I have installed.

I can't believe people haven't figured out a way to install the drivers and stuff without all the extra crap lol.
 
All recent creative cards have hard-ware 3d sound accelleration. The later ones do advanced and advanced HD EAX effects. All with very little game performance hit.

No other card does 3d accelleration, thats the whole thing where creative beats everyone else.

As for simple music, it probably doesn't matter about accelleration and other cards do sound better.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top