$50 Sound Cards Impress Versus Integrated Audio

crookedvulture writes "Most PCs have audio integrated right on the motherboard. There's much to be gained from upgrading to a discrete sound card, though. This look at a couple of sub-$50 sound cards from Asus explores what can be found at the budget end of the spectrum. In blind listening tests, both cards produced better sound than an integrated solution. They also offered superior signal quality, but neither had an impact on gaming performance. The days of hardware-accelerated game audio seem to be behind us, with developers handling positional audio processing in software."

Comments

Re:Avoid Asus AT ALL COSTS

[gman003]

How is this off-topic? The article, even the summary states that this is about Asus discrete audio cards. And I address not just general reliability concerns, but also audio-specific problems.

Honestly, sometimes I wonder if /. moderators are paid shills, or just really, really dumb.