Onboard vs PCI soundcard

[unozero]

my Asus board has a onboard Soundmax sound solution,however I do have one of the first Xfi PCI cards.Would it be better if I used the Xfi?

I mostly use my PC for games right now I'm also using a Amp from Onkyo for oth my Sennheiser HD428's and Klipsch 2.1 setup.
Should I put it back in or not eve bother.

your thoughts?

well it make a big differnce.

 

[YROC]

I use onboard sounds because i'm able to. It sounds great. I don't think a soundcard will make a difference. It'll just enable sound if you don't have it.

 

[Quixoticism]

I'd rather use the X-Fi. If you have nice speakers/headset you should notice a difference.

 

[VirusType2]

Onboard audio sounds like shit. The S/N ratio is ghetto style.

If you can't tell the difference, get better speakers/amplifiers, because they sound like shit too, then.

Seriously. I mean, onboard is perfectly usable if you don't care about such things as clean clear quality, but if you have the option, go with the "most powerful audio processor ever" in the X-Fi.

I don't even think the X-Fi sounds all that great (really lacks some balls in the low end - probably a fault of wimpy inexpensive capacitors and EMI), but it's still 1,000% better than onboard.

Signal-to-noise ratio is defined as the power ratio between a signal (meaningful information) and the background noise (unwanted signal)

 

[unozero]

aight I'll do it in the morning.

 

[Dinnesch]

thb I think most premium(>$50) sound cards just use some software equalizer to 'improve' sound quality, when listening to music/playing a game you shouldn't be able to notice any difference.

 

[VirusType2]

Xfi has the Crystalizer. TBH it helps a lot on low quality mp3s (like 128kbps or less), but you shouldn't be listening to low quality mp3s . Just disable all those gimmicks, otherwise you'll have to turn it on and off all the time.

 

[Viperidae]

X-fi is overpriced for what you get.

If your speakers/headphones suck or if you don't know what you're listening for then there's no point in getting a PCI card.

 

[Stigmata]

Most important thing to consider here:

Onboard sound cards, 9 times out of 10, offload audio processing to the CPU. PCI sound cards, if they are of meaningful quality, have their own onboard audio processors. In other words, using the X-Fi card will give you a boost of around 1-3fps depending on your other specs.

 

[MuToiD_MaN]

Of course if you have a newfangled 4-core processor, it would use otherwise-unused cycles for the sound, right?

 

[Stigmata]

Good point.

Even so, an actual hardware audio processor is always preferable to a software implementation.