Which Should He Use Sound Card Wise?

[indyjones]

Hey there my housemate has just got a new motherboard its an nforce2 400 (non ultra) with the realtek 6 channel onboard sound, which is better his trusty creative live 5.1 sound card or the onboard one ?

Cheers

 

[dreamliner77]

Both are pretty ugly sound-wise, but there are ways to make the Live sound better (KX Project drivers, media player plugins to upsample to 48khz, etc).

To really check out a cards/chips performance check out Rightmark Audio Analyzer http://audio.rightmark.org/

 

[indyjones]

He uses 4.0 speaker setup so i dont think KX will be any good as I belive they only uselessly supported 5.1 and 2.0. The definatly did not support my 6.1. Shame they looked quite nice, mind you my create ones sound good since i made the effort to calibrate them 🙂

 

[Unleashed]

Small thing, isnt 400 Ultra? Else its 333?

 

[indyjones]

Nopers is 400 but just single channel here is the full info its on offer at overclockers.co.uk for £26 which I think is a great price.

But which sound solution should he use ?

 

[indyjones]

This is the info on the sound chip "Cmedia 9739A 6--Channel AC`97 Codec"

 

[dreamliner77]

Oh, I forgot, if he games, he will probably want the live as it supports EAX.

 

[indyjones]

Good point

 

[Geffy]

oh I was about to say the onboard sound cause "SoundStorm" is well good, but it looks like he got screwed by the board manufacturer and they stuck a CMedia on there to save money

 

[dreamliner77]

Soundstorm is okay if you are using analog. It really shines in digital.

 

[indyjones]

i have never even used my soundstorm chip i prefer my audigy 2