# Onboard audio or soundcard?

## |Quantum|

Hi,

I was wondering lately why anyone would spend extra money for a soundcard given that virtually every mainboard has the logic for audio built-in.

Would there be any difference in --let's say-- gameplay? (e.g. is the sound actually <better>)?

If so can you tell me why and what I would get for my bucks  :Smile: 

Greetings!

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## eccerr0r

You'll have to be the judge of that.  Some people can tell the differences, but if you're like me, I can't tell the difference, they both sound the same and I'll have no way to tell them apart.

Some boards use more CPU power to generate sound, some have "coprocessors" to offload work.  For the most part I've not noticed a big slowdown under any circumstances - except when renderring MIDI with timidity, etc.

All my machines that have offboard soundcards have one because they need to multiplex in two sound sources or don't have (working) sound hardware onboard.

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## raven5

One reason to buy one is if you do sound mixing and require many more input and output channels of different types, say xlr mics and so forth.

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## PaulBredbury

 *|Quantum| wrote:*   

> virtually every mainboard has the logic for audio built-in.

 

In my experience they've been pathetic. They can't do hardware mixing (causing problems in Linux games) and probably can't do midi. Their sound quality is inferior to a SoundBlaster Live (which costs peanuts these days), and it's very noticeable if you have decent speakers (I have Logitech Z-5500).

Edit: Updated broken URL for Z-5500 speaker review.Last edited by PaulBredbury on Sat Sep 22, 2007 9:25 am; edited 1 time in total

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## Monkeh

To put it bluntly, onboard 'sound cards' are crap. In every way possible.

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## Cyker

This used to be true, but is getting less true these days.

Onboard sound is generally at the level of a SoundBlaster 16 - Stereo and only 2 raw wave channels, so multiple sounds must be mixed in software before being sent to the card. MIDI also must be emulated MOD/XM/IT-style (Quite CPU intensive).

Under Windows, a proper soundcard nukes this - They (can) have cool stuff like hardware mixing of hundreds of audio channels to stereo, or 2.1/4.1/5.1 etc. surround, environmental effects (EAX; Basically jumped up reverb), onboard MIDI processing to wavetable banks, hardware decrunching of ADPCM, MP3, AAC, DTS etc., breakout-box with IR controls and extra I/O ports in drive bay etc.

You can't always use half this crap in Linux however because almost all the cards that do this are totally closed. Creative Labs has a virtual monopoly on the soundcard market, but are very OpenSource unfriendly.

No X-FI support is the result of this, but that's okay, we just don't buy them  :Smile: 

Current level of support for their soundcards is limited to EMU10k-series, and because they're so old the support is pretty good - We get things like hardware mixing and EAX, and hardware wavetable support (Still using the ancient AWE32 utilities too  :Wink: ), 'tho I don't think hardware decoding support currently exists.

Some of the newer onboard chipsets are catching up (Stuff like RealTek Oxygen or whatever it was called?), and have stuff like hardware mixing, EAX (1) and hardware decrunching. Better yet, these chipsets are usually far better supported in Linux because, unlike Creative's stuff, they have open specs.

The only glaring omission is MIDI/wavetable support - I haven't seen any onboard soundchip with this (They all use the crappy Microsoft software MIDI), but if you can live without it then most of the recent onboard soundchips will be as good as expensive CreativeLabs card for anyone but the heavy audiophile  :Wink: 

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## Naib

advantage of a PCI card over on-board... if things go wrong (item falls down back of PC..) and connection breaks then just the card taken out as opose to the mobo and the need to (possibly) replace alot. modular  is always better

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## Monkeh

Onboard cards lack hardware mixing (not so much of an issue if you avoid using ALSA), have terrible sound quality, and tend to suffer badly from interference. There is little point in using onboard sound if you can afford a tenner for an old Live! card, or better yet, something non-creative (which generally will require non-ALSA drivers due to lack of hardware mixing).

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## |Quantum|

So, if I understand you guys correctly:

   - soundcards are better, but

   - the new Soundblasters are unsupported?

One of the complaints I have about my system is that I have a 7.1  system,

but it really can't impress me. Most of the time just plain old stereo sounds as good, if not better, then 7.1,

even in Windows. The souncard I have is onboard nVidia nForce 3.

-D-

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## Monkeh

Proper soundcards are much better. The 'new' X-Fi cards (which suck badly anyway) aren't supported, and hopefully never will be (let's not encourage them to produce more crappy hardware please).

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## |Quantum|

 *Monkeh wrote:*   

> Proper soundcards are much better. The 'new' X-Fi cards (which suck badly anyway) aren't supported, and hopefully never will be (let's not encourage them to produce more crappy hardware please).

 

Well, do you have a suggestion for a proper, nicely supported soundcard?   :Smile: 

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## Monkeh

 *|Quantum| wrote:*   

>  *Monkeh wrote:*   Proper soundcards are much better. The 'new' X-Fi cards (which suck badly anyway) aren't supported, and hopefully never will be (let's not encourage them to produce more crappy hardware please). 
> 
> Well, do you have a suggestion for a proper, nicely supported soundcard?  

 

Anything with an emu10kx chipset will work fine. If you're not against closed-source drivers, try something based on the envy24 or envy24ht chipset (try an M-Audio card).

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