Are sound cards important?

[iandh]

Two benefits:
1) Higher SNR. Most motherboard audio has a SNR of ~100dB or less. If you have speakers with a SNR dB greater than 100dB, you should find a card that matches or exceeds the capabilities of your speakers.
2) Off loads audio processing from the CPU. This means a gain in FPS 1-10fps typical.

A third benefit: I have headphones plugged in to onboard and my Klipsch speakers plugged in to my Creative Audigy 2 ZS card. Instead of messing with wires, I can change the default audio device to make it go one way or the other.

Fourth benefit

Better equalization and sound control. For instance, my X-Fi has a full graphic EQ and a bass boost w/adjustable cutoff, whereas the crappy onboard realtek has horrid sounding "rock, pop, blues" presets that are a kind of "spray and pray" method of tweaking in your sound.

 

[Steevo]

My ADI on this board sounds almost as good as my turtle beach did.

 

[bpgt64]

They can be, sometimes if you have good enough headphones, you can hear small amounts of static/buzzing across the board, generated and related to your CPU. I used to get this all the time and solved it with a sound card. It just depends what your tolerance for noise is.

 

[Steevo]

I use nice headphones. My turtle beach suffered from the same PCI-e noise issues as my on board. So the SNR rating for a sound card is utter shit, most motherboards create so much noise you would need to crate a metal shell to protect the card, and traces, and you would still have crosstalk during high PCI-e use.



I am thinking about making a cover for the chip itself and see if that will drop some of the noise.

 

[Jeffredo]

Onboards are getting much better, they don't really help FPS too much anymore unless you are playing crysis on your single core 2.0 celly...

Well, that is a bit of an exaggeration. I do notice the FPS difference between onboard Realtek (which sounds fine to me) and a hardware sound card (anywhere from 3-10 FPS). That can be the difference between smooth and choppy with some games. While my system is far from top end these days its not a single core Celeron either.

I remember a thread similar to this 2-3 years ago when I was still using my Athlon64 3700+ single core system. I noticed the same kind of results between onboard and dedicated (small FPS boost) back then and someone said "yeah, but its because your system is so old". I saw similar FPS benefits as soon as I built this one with a much stronger (at the time) dual core CPU.

 

[Kovoet]

Or what you could do is get yourself a set of Logitech G35 headset and they are a nice piece of kit and it runs off a USB port

 

[Scrizz]

I use nice headphones. My turtle beach suffered from the same PCI-e noise issues as my on board. So the SNR rating for a sound card is utter shit, most motherboards create so much noise you would need to crate a metal shell to protect the card, and traces, and you would still have crosstalk during high PCI-e use.



I am thinking about making a cover for the chip itself and see if that will drop some of the noise.

what turtle beach did you have?

 

[Steevo]

MontegoDDL

I it for optical in and out, DTS, and just great quality. But every system I have seen suffers from some crosstalk on the PCI lanes and also on the card itself.

 

[ste2425]

think is with headphones they cannot replicate the same frequencies as a stereo or surrond system for example so whilst you will notice the benifits of a higher sound to noise ratio and no sound glitches u wont notice the better bass it may even distort your headphones, it all depends on your whole sound set up and even more on your hearing to weather onboard is as good as a special card or not

 

[Steevo]

think is with headphones they cannot replicate the same frequencies as a stereo or surrond system for example so whilst you will notice the benifits of a higher sound to noise ratio and no sound glitches u wont notice the better bass it may even distort your headphones, it all depends on your whole sound set up and even more on your hearing to weather onboard is as good as a special card or not

You are right, headphones have a much higher fidelity and better articulation than most speakers.


Thus the reason they use headphones when mixing tracks.