Cajun Posted April 5, 2011 Posted April 5, 2011 My creative xtreme gamer sound card crapped out. I was wondering if my rig benefits from having a sound card as opposed to using on-board sound. I can play DCS A-10 on my rig pretty decently using medium settings and Blackshark and Flaming Cliffs 2 using medium to high settings. You can see my rig specs below. While I would like to upgrade to a new rig, I don't have the money right now. You can see my rig specs below. Thanks for your help. AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ 2.6 GHz ATI Radeon™ HD 5670 (1GB) 4GB PC2-4200 DDR II SDRAM 1 TB Serial ATA-300 320 GB Serial ATA-300 Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Windows 7 MCE 64 bit
Ptroinks Posted April 5, 2011 Posted April 5, 2011 If you have on-board sound, you should just try it and see how it goes. In any case, spending lots of money on a sound card is a waste, if you ask me. You can get plenty of cheap sound cards that provide excellent sound for gaming. Of course, if you're used to very high-end sound, your standards might be higher than mine :). I have a SteelSeries Siberia v2 USB sound card and head set. [sIGPIC][/sIGPIC]
nemises Posted April 5, 2011 Posted April 5, 2011 sure..offboard sound processing is almost always going to lower the CPU overhead of sound processing, as long as the program supports using it (I think Open AI, and direct-sound are examples?) Usually (but not always) an on board sound card will use system resources to pre / post process sounds instead. In modern machines, the impact is probably fairly negligible though , so I wouldn't be too sad about it, just use your onboard sound
winz Posted April 5, 2011 Posted April 5, 2011 The preformance boost from a dedicated sound card is very small, if any at all. So it comes down to personal preference, whether or not you can hear the difference between an onboard and dedicated card. The Valley A-10C Version Revanche for FC 3
Cajun Posted April 5, 2011 Author Posted April 5, 2011 Thanks for the help. I will give on-board sound a try and save the sound card money for a new rig
BHawthorne Posted April 5, 2011 Posted April 5, 2011 (edited) I tend to prefer just getting a motherboard that does onboard sound with digital out to my home theater system for surround. The key thing for me is to have the digital out for good sound quality. With the signal straight to the home theater system being digital, there is no real issue with using onboard vs a card. Both should sound the same, afterall it's sound that is transfered as just a bunch of 0's and 1's regardless of if it's a card or onboard. Analog is a different matter, but all my setups use digital out. Edited April 5, 2011 by BHawthorne
Silent Warrior Posted April 8, 2011 Posted April 8, 2011 Sound hardware doesn't matter nearly as much from Vista and onwards - I think MS did some abstraction monkey business, and it's all essentially software mixing/sampling/whatever. While onboard soundcards have come a long way (I'm fundamentally biased against the things, nevertheless), they do have the aforementioned CPU overhead. As well as no EAX, I believe. It depends on what games you want to use it for, really. I don't think DCS/Lock-On uses EAX, so if that's your only concern, onboard with digital output will probably be enough for you - listening to music/watching DVDs will also be good enough. Otherwise, find yourself a soundcard with sensible functionality and build-quality, and don't be afraid to go cheap.
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