Sound card with lowest CPU utilization

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brentzki

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Feb 12, 2003
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I've read lot's of arguments about sound card quality, as far as how they sound, but does anyone know how they stack up as far as CPU utilization. I currently have an IC7 and use the onboard sound. I'm relatively happy with the quality, but if I were to upgrade to a card, I'd wan't one that wouldn't be adding extra load to the CPU.
 
The battle is between Audigy 2 and soundstorm. Audigy 2 may have a little edge.
 
Originally posted by oqvist
The battle is between Audigy 2 and soundstorm. Audigy 2 may have a little edge.
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What the audigy is like 1 or 2% better at utilization? that's not to much in differents. one will not see the differents anyways. I for one dont look at CPU utilization as much as sound quality and other aspects of a sound card.
 
Originally posted by Zardoz
What the audigy is like 1 or 2% better at utilization? that's not to much in differents. one will not see the differents anyways. I for one dont look at CPU utilization as much as sound quality and other aspects of a sound card.
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Yes. But the question was lowest CPU utilization and that Audigy probably has. And if you compare AC97 and Audigy/Audigy 2/soundstorm there is a real difference in performance.

As you may have noticed setting sound acceleration to full can have a real impact in performance. And sound quality in games are never as good as the prerecorded ones in music and movies anyway. But all those three are really up to the task.
 
The only standalone board with full hardware support for D3D sound and OpenAL at the moment is in the Audigy series. Rumors abound that Nvidia will unveil a standalone version of SoundStorm pretty soon. That would be something to look out for, but for now the Audigy series is it.
 
Originally posted by PliotronX
The only standalone board with full hardware support for D3D sound and OpenAL at the moment is in the Audigy series. Rumors abound that Nvidia will unveil a standalone version of SoundStorm pretty soon. That would be something to look out for, but for now the Audigy series is it.
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Well I just ordered an Audigy 2 and I don´t know if I made a misstake. People with receivers and such obviously get no bass or very weak bass in games.
 
Part of what I wanted to know was how much performance increase I would see in games, Call Of Duty for example, if I were to run an audigy versus the ALC650 that I have on my motherboard. I know that sound processing is often overlooked in the framerate equation. As the Audigy has HW support for D3D sound and other effects, would that have any effect on system performance?
 
Originally posted by brentzki
Part of what I wanted to know was how much performance increase I would see in games, Call Of Duty for example, if I were to run an audigy versus the ALC650 that I have on my motherboard. I know that sound processing is often overlooked in the framerate equation. As the Audigy has HW support for D3D sound and other effects, would that have any effect on system performance?
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But then EAX is knowned to absolutely kill performance in some games. Even if you got an Audigy.

But it all depends. If your cpu is your bottleneck you will probably see a difference since getting an Audigy or soundstorm do free up CPU resources. If your video card is your bottleneck you may very well see no difference at all.

But you will probably see some improvement definiatly. Especially in term of sound quality so it´s worth it either way.
 
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