Author Topic: need sound card advice (Read 389 times)

WhiteHawk · « **on:** December 14, 2003, 11:30:53 AM »

Using onboard sound for my ic7-max3. It seems ok, but loses a little depth occasionally. I dont know why. Whould a $50 sound card do me any measure of good, or do I have to go high end to see any clear cut difference in sound quality. All I do with sound is gaming.

ty for all help

715 · « **Reply #1 on:** December 14, 2003, 02:53:07 PM »

I think perhaps the most important aspect for sound cards, in relation to gaming, is the implementation of the 3D sound drivers. I have had terrible problems with sound cards on my new computer, and for that reason have tried a bunch of different ones, including the onboard sound, Creative SB16, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, and Creative SB Live 5.1. Each had quite different implementation of 3D sound, things like attenuation of distant outside sounds, doppler shift, etc. For example, the Santa Cruz had a bug in the 3D drivers (perhaps since fixed) that caused all outside sound to be virtually inaudible- ie a Panzer could drive right up next to you and you wouldn't hear it. Conversely, the SB Live 5.1 had the best handling of external sound, with very realistic doppler, proper attenuation, and even very realistic filtering of distant sounds (ie that distant muffled character). On the other hand, the Creative installation software totally munged my system on many attempts (including nuking my Registry forcing use of a backup Regsitry that was out of date).

My experience was with Win98SE on an Intel 865 MB with a 2.8C GHz P4. Your mileage will undoubtely vary and you shouldn't make judgements based on one person's experience.

715

mold · « **Reply #2 on:** December 14, 2003, 03:07:36 PM »

Whitehawk--

If you are talking about the 2-channel sounds, you will almost certainly hear no difference in sound quality between your onboard sound and even the most expensive sound cards. Except there may be a difference in noise, which could go either way (I have had noisy sound cards that were supposedly "high end"). For multi-channel sound, I think 715 has some good comments about this, i.e. there are some differences. But when you say "loses depth" what exactly do you mean? I have a feeling that, as with 99.99999% of sound problems, this has to do with the rest of your system and not with the source soundcard.

WhiteHawk · « **Reply #3 on:** December 14, 2003, 07:41:56 PM »

Loses depth=flying along with awsome engine sound, all of a sudden a frequency is muffled. Its hard to explain. Its like when one of your stereo speakers loses a tweeter or something. Also get alot of noise while scrolling. No biggie, but definatley makes me wonder what I am missing.
All my dxdiag tests come out ok.

beet1e · « **Reply #4 on:** December 15, 2003, 12:43:09 AM »

WH,

I don't recognise that mobo you have. I have a Asus A7N8X-DLX, and I've recently removed my old Creative Live! Value SB16 card (suspected it was causing stability problems - it wasn't, as it turned out). This card was getting a bit old, and it was getting harder to locate drivers for use on the later OS. I had always thought that sound through a dedicated sound card would be 10x better than onboard sound, but I have changed my mind. The onboard sound is excellent. I use a headset for AH (easier for voice comms) and whereas with the soundcard on Windows ME I could always hear a sort of "howl around" effect (the background sound in my room playing through the earphones) with the onboard sound, there is none of this.

BTW - I have that same vid card as you. What frame rate do you get in AH? I'm getting triple digit frame rates much of the time.

mold · « **Reply #5 on:** December 15, 2003, 12:08:30 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by WhiteHawk
Loses depth=flying along with awsome engine sound, all of a sudden a frequency is muffled. Its hard to explain. Its like when one of your stereo speakers loses a tweeter or something. Also get alot of noise while scrolling. No biggie, but definatley makes me wonder what I am missing.

Do you play through your home stereo, or through separate speakers? If it sounds like you are losing a tweeter occasionally, this may in fact be exactly what is happening... What exactly is the sound system you use? 2 ch vs surround?

WhiteHawk · « **Reply #6 on:** December 15, 2003, 12:49:54 PM »

nahhh..headphones. Maybe bad, but they always check out in the sound tests

mold · « **Reply #7 on:** December 15, 2003, 01:14:31 PM »

Oof, I'm at a loss then. If 715's comments are accurate, perhaps it has something to do with the mixing of the sound that the game utilizes the 3D drivers for. But I don't know even if AH uses such libraries, or if it does it's own thing.

Question for Skuzzy, perhaps? This may even be just normal operation of the game. Try playing an MP3 through it, see if you occasionally get the same loss of quality.

jonnyb · « **Reply #8 on:** December 15, 2003, 04:27:41 PM »

The biggest difference between the use of an onboard solution and a dedicated card is CPU usage. Unless you have an extremely good speaker setup (klipsch promdedia types) to match your soundcard the differences are even less noticed. Most of the newer boards (asus, msi, etc) use the same chips you'll find on the dedicated cards. So, it really boils down to an issue of bottlenecking. Basically, unless you're running a dinosaur of a processor, you won't notice more than a 3-5 fps difference in games with an onboard solution.

WhiteHawk · « **Reply #9 on:** December 16, 2003, 06:37:32 AM »

yea..the onboard sound is called realtek AC'97. It seams like its pretty good. I guesss i'll stick with it.\

thnx for all help