onboard sound vs soundblaster, rapid response desired

Hi,

I'm rebuilding an old system. I may think I'm clever on some things,
but sound is not one of them.

I intended to keep the old soundcard, Soundblaster Live, Player 5.1,
Dolby Digital, PCI. But then I though it is quite old. And there is
this Realtek ALC655 AC'97 v2.3 6-channel onboard sound on the new
mobo, and maybe that is better?

I suppose I would save a little power too, by keeping the onboard
sound?

Please tell me what you think. And I'm doing this right now, so
expedient answers will be more relevant. Though I can always
reconsider later.

Ancra

 

Depends how finicky you are about audio performance, since the onboard
sound takes some system resources. Since I don't care for higher end
audio, I use on-board sound.

 

Go with the Live. I just built a new Intel system on a 865GBF mobo.
Although the sound was an improvment over AC97 it still sucked, and took up
system resources. I plugged in my SB Live and things are great. Remember
to disable the onboard sound in bios prior to installing the SB, otherwise
funny thing happen.

 

Using the on-board sound will somewhat slow down your CPU. You're better
off using the SoundBlaster if you play games.

 

I know some people have had bad experiences with onboard sound, but my
brother's and best friend's computers are running onboard sound and it
sounds fine. My brother even has a nice Logitec Z560 5.1 channel speaker
system hooked up to it. It sounds great. I think onboard sound has gotten a
bad rap by some.

I have a Soundblaster Audigy Platinum on my system and have disabled onboard
sound, however. I wanted the midi, microphone, IEEE1394 and other
connections it provides as well as kick-ass sound.

I doubt the onboard is better than that Live card. Onboard sound is usually
pretty basic.


--
Big Daddy Ruel Smith

My SuSE Linux machine uptime:
7:23pm up 44 days 4:09, 2 users, load average: 0.23, 0.34, 0.30

My Windows XP machine uptime:
Something less...

 

- Thanks all of you! I disabled onboard sound. The build went well,
but I haven't installed the soundblaster yet. I'll do that in a few
minutes...

Ancra

 

I recently had similar thoughs, but in my case it was the Soundblaster
Live Value. I had had some problems with this card back in the AMD
K6/2 400 days with the older VIA chipset. When I upgraded to an Abit
KT7/Duron 700 (later Athlon 1000) I no longer had any problems. More
recently I upgraded to the Epox 8K9A7I ( and I must be one of ten
people using this MB) and ran for a while with the onboard sound.
(similar, if not identical to yours). After two weeks I reinstalled
the SB. Low base (I have a subwoofer and it was mostly silent and
yes, I did play around with the various controls) and somewhat
scratchy sound when playing CD quality music.

 

Ok, one of eleven people then, because that was exactly the board I
bought. (Their 8KRAI looks nice too, but I went with steal rather than
just dirtcheap ). I put in the SB. It wasn't the Live Player, I
stated in the post. I forgot I put that one in another machine. So
this was a SB 128 4.1, or something like that.

Ancra