Motherboard Audio Comes Of Age

darth_silliarse writes "ExtremeTech have thankfully confirmed that I am not completely deaf - onboard m/b sound is not as bad as it sounds. Is onboard sound for the poor, needy or completely bone idle? What are other peoples opinions of m/b sound? If nothing else, it frees up a PCI or ISA slot... ;o)"

Comments

An old yet relevant review

[MikShapi]

THG did a nice rundown a while ago on (still-)existing audio chipsets on Mobos and sound cards, comparing bells&whistles, CPU usage and IIRC quality.

Cheers.

Re:It's all in the speakers

[afidel]

And much better than speakers is a decent set of headphones. Cans will beat speakers costing several times as much. Get a pair of cheaper Sennheisers (HD487's) or Grado's (SR 60's) which come in well under the $100 mark but will just blow you away with their awsome sound quality if you are used to anything but an audiophile setup. From there you might get into some of the more expensive models but these are great for me and I'm used to studio monitors.

Performance hit?

[Realistic_Dragon]

There were some articles on Tom's Hardware a while back (can't find them now) which gave anything up to an 18% performance hit (frame rate wise) for onboard sound with EAX enabled.

Turning on EAX with my audigy or SB live platinum makes 1-2% difference.

Presumably the onboard sound chips are using the CPU for a lot more of the grunt work - not a great thing for a gamer, or indeed for a Linux user* unless they are _sure_ that there will be (good) drivers for that chip.

*Yes, yes, you can be a gamer _and_ a Linux user you know.

Noisey Anyway

[Book16]

In most situations I don't think it actually matters. A computer produces so much EMI which in turn creates noise in the audio regardless of whether you are running on-board sound or otherwise. Unless you are getting the signal out of the computer digitally, there is going to be noise. The only real reason I can think of for buying a high-end peripheral sound-card is if you need it for use as part of a digital audio workstation (high smaple-rates, resolution etc... or because you want multi-channel surround. -- Book

Re:Not on a Mac it 'aint

[BiggerIsBetter]

Not necessarily. If the signal path from the Mac into the stereo amp is electrically noisier than the signal path from the stereo's CD player to the amp, it could easily sound worse from the Mac. The source signal would be very much the same, but it's getting fux0red along the way.

Re:My Experience

[bigman2003]

I was wondering when/if someone was going to mention Nforce 2.

Here is a page with good info about the sound on an Nforce 2 motherboard. http://www.3dvelocity.com/reviews/nforce2/nforce_2 .htm

All of that looks impressive for ON BOARD sound, and I really think that 99.9% of the people out there would find that this is good enough.

Re:Good Enough

[twiztidlojik]

The other good thing about MP3 is its versatility. Your examples are fitted perfectly for their bitrates, but I prefer a better-quality MP3 as I do listen to MP3's on my home stereo and other places where a high-quality bitrate is A Good Thing. I would rather sacrifice space for quality on my iPod, but you sacrifice quality for space. This is a personal preference. I prefer high-quality.