Reccomend me a sound card

[Pezley]

Ok, so i went from the asus k7n8x-d board which had a descent soundstorm built in with full support for dd through coaxial.

upgraded and now have a msi k8n ne02 plat....... the sound is crap.
its set up through coaxial and i have tried optical and no matter what i do it wont support anything,. it misses audio and dvd's and games are not fully supporting 5.1.... its rubbish

so any good sound cards i dont have to sell my sould to afford ?

[Magnakai]

Depends what you want it for...

I'd be suprised if the inbuilt soundcard was really that bad. Have you tried updating the drivers?

If it is, then any Creative effort from the past few years should do you fine.
As long as you're not into sound recording or whatnot there's absolutely no need to spend any more than that.

[mid]

Sorry, I'm not aware of a single board on the market that will do 5.1 through the digital output for games. NVidia Soundstorm was the absolute nuts, but they never put it on a PCI card, and Creative continue to insist that you use the 6x analogue outputs for surround. The insist that it sounds better, those of us that don't want to fill our homes with wires remain convinced it's because they don't want to pay Dolby for the license.

I've just got ?11 worth of Aureon 5.1 from Scan, which works ok and has optical input and output for stereo in games and 5.1 for DVD.

[Magnakai]

It seems like this one does:

http://uk.europe.creative.com/shop/product.asp?prod=772&page=6

?50 with a breakout box isn't bad, actually.
Still, shameful that they're not on their regular cards.

All the X-Fi stuff is horribly overpriced for a POS crappy consumer soundcard. For the ?200 they're asking for the top of the range one, you could get a really decent Edirol Firewire external soundcard with far better sound quality, mic pre-amps and proper MIDI.

[eastyy]

Thought i would post this here.

I use a in built sound card if i was to replace it with a decent sound card would that improve the performance in games?

[PeteBrant]

Thought i would post this here.

I use a in built sound card if i was to replace it with a decent sound card would that improve the performance in games?

Dpends on the chipset of the onboard sound. Cheaper version use the processor for sound processing (software surround - like Miles 3D etc), so yes, you would see a small improvement. SOme board use hardware sound (i.e a dedicated processor for sound) but these typically only support up to EAX2

That's not the main reason to upgrade though - Hardware sound is a massive improvement over software. You can get an Audigy 2 for next to nothing now with full EAX2,3,4 & HD support - the difference in quality is clear. And when games use environmental effects (EAX HD) it can be stunning.

[eastyy]

I think the sound card is a ac97 Realtek ALC850

[SubparMario]

That's pretty good as they go. Wouldn't bother upgrading unless you feel sound quality is bad or want to use a fancy surround set-up for games.

[sj33]

Bargin http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=98937